Several years back I had a conversation with an editor of a lit journal and I mentioned I didn’t read all that much fiction (at least as a % of all I read)(let’s be clear though: I love fiction, my favorite books are fiction, I write it, etc.), and she replied laughing, admitted the same thing. Which doesn’t necessarily mean a thing, other than this: I write fiction and poetry, and can’t for a minute imagine writing book-length nonfiction (or even just an essay), yet the bulk of what I read and enjoy on a day-to-day basis is stuff from outside those genres (imagine a vegan chef who only eats meat on her own time). I suppose there’s potentially a rich and rewarding consideration to be made of why this is so (fiction’s so easy to mess up, and the distance [in terms of readerly pleasure] between good and great fiction is greater than the distance between good and great nonfiction [or so anyway claims I, the guy who can’t/won’t write the stuff], plus even if the book of nonfiction ends up fundamentally not working at a wordy, literary level, you at least leave the experience having gotten something, having found out real, verifiable info [the nuance of sustaining crawfish populations or whatever]). I’m, however, not real interested in that consideration: I’ll just say that it seems to this pretty omnivorous reader that book-length (literary [not stuff *about* literature, but I just want to at least bracket off what I’m talking about from cookbooks and empty celebrity bios and lots of what ends up on the NYTimes nonfiction bestseller list]) nonfiction seems the most glorious genre at present.
For the record: this is, sort of, a review of the dynamite Killer Stuff and Tons of Money by Maureen Stanton, which is subtitled Seeking History and Hidden Gems in Flea-Market America, and which I couldn’t stop reading––it’s a solid day’s reading, one of those books you’ll start early and won’t really be able to put down or shake till you’re finished. One of the reasons Killer Stuff‘s so great is because of its subject matter: the multi-valent minutae of flea markets and antique fairs is, I’ll submit, just fascinating as a topic (TV backs this up: check out the longevity of Antiques Roadshow, or the number of shows which focus centrally on people engaging in what can only be considered treasure hunting [American Pickers, Pawn Stars, etc.). But the real reason Killer Stuff is so fantastic is because Maureen Stanton’s such a remarkable guide, a factor that’s absolutely critical in literary nonfiction. This gets tricky.
One phenomenal thing that literary nonfiction offers is an actual place for the author. Certainly poetry and fiction offer this as well–from DFWallace post-modernly inserting a DFWallace into Pale Kingto Dorothea Lasky making herself right clearly in her poems (the first lines from “It’s a Lonely World”: “It’s a lonely world / Hi everybody / It’s Dorothea, Dorothea Lasky”)–but that move’s a (sometimes tricky and/or aesthetically tough) decision on the author’s part. Not so in nonfiction, by and large: most literary nonfiction in some way offers the reader the author (plus when it’s poetry or fiction, the author may or may not be the author; in nonfiction, the contract between reader and writer demands it actually be Maureen Stanton when she deploys any first person pronoun). Think of the greats–Weschler or McPhee or Didion or Kael or whoever–and for each there’s a strong argument to be made that the actual presence of a considerate, considering human guide–of that specific human guide–is what makes their work so wonderful (anybody who’s made it through McPhee’s Annals of the Former World knows that McPhee’s humor’s what makes the 1000+ pages breeze). In fact, it’s easier to think about this stuff by considering how rare it is for a nonfiction author not to be present in his/her own pages: the tallest bar set regarding this has to be LeBlanc’s Random Family in which the author’s literally just not there, ever.
The point of all this stuff is that in literary nonfiction we get not just info, but we get that info mediated by another human presence, and because of that we’re (often, in the good books) given the author’s surprises, failures, mistakes–all of it. This may be the reason literary nonfiction’s so spectacular: it’s maybe the most human genre at present; it not only allows for but almost, to a degree, demands a real author being a real person.
All this comes up hugely in Stanton’s Killer Stuff: the book itself comes, in fact, out of a college friendship with a collecter she names Curt Avery in her book (it should be noted, too, that the book’s title–with “stuff” replaced by its jucier four-letter version–is a line spoken by Avery). Through the book Stanton tracks her own interest in antiques, and the book itself ends up being something like a result or summation of what Stanton and Avery both claim’s so significant about antiques to begin with, which is knowledge, study, learning: one can’t very well go to an antique sale or flea market (with the intention of buying good stuff, anyway, good meaning authentic and/or valuable) without being able to tell the difference between the killer stuff and the dross (and the reader’s given this lesson through–yes, of course–Stanton telling of a few of her own mis-steps and mistakes and, eventually, her successes). If you close this book even remotely more interested in antiques and flea markets than you were when you cracked the thing, I’d argue it’s not just because Stanton’s a great writer but because she’s a great guide, a (maybe even) great person in allowing her own story and take on things to provide easier access to those of us who haven’t done the work she has. Regardless: you should be reading this book. You should be purchasing this promptly and giving yourself the time and quiet and cool to sit and get through the whole thing.