Brendan Kiley has already written about it in The Stranger‘s
book section, but it deserves to be repeated: Rebecca Brown’s new book,
American Romances, is an incredible collection of essays.
And like most really good books, as soon as you finish reading it, you
want to read more books that are just like it. But that’s
impossible—books are all bad in the same sort of way; good books
are good (in part) precisely because they are unique.
If American Romances didn’t exist, the best collection of the
season would clearly be The Importance of Being Iceland from
MIT’s literary press Semiotext(e). Eileen Myles is best known for her
semi-autobiographical novel Cool for You, and for good reason:
It’s a fantastic book, at once a raw memoir and a weird experiment in
conversational language. Myles is a brilliant stylist; she writes in a
way that we wish we could talk. Which is why it’s so exciting to
finally have a great big slab of essays, to observe her language when
she’s not constrained by the rules of poetry or fiction. We get to hear
what she says when she’s being herself.
Myles writes about anything that appeals to her at the moment:
Iceland, visual art, automotive repair, and lesbianism. She’s bold in
her truth-telling. In a piece about Allen Ginsberg, Myles makes no
apologies for his tendencies to eroticize very young men:
Our whole culture is pedophilic in the way it celebrates youth, we
can barely look at youth without eroticizing it, and then NAMBLA
takes one step forward and says I want to eat you, and for this even
gay culture wants to throw them out.There’s something about Myles’s delivery that seems straight-faced
but has a slightly daffy tone. Sentences come from out of nowhere to
slap the reader in the side of the head, like this question from
an interview with Daniel Day-Lewis:I have several myths about actors that I wanted to unload. One thinks
of actors as the abstemious or the excessive type. Like, Richard Gere
only drinks tea, and Richard Burton has a heart attack and dies.
What’s your relation to excess?
The tenuous relationship between heart attacks and excesses makes
sense once you think about it, but there’s a comical moment, somewhere
around the Richard Gere part of the sentence, where you have to wonder
if Myles has come completely unrooted in the conversation with
Day-Lewis and is floating around in the atmosphere. These strange
moments are everywhere in her essays, and they make reading Myles a
distinct pleasure; in this book, more than any other, she invites us to
join her up in the clouds for a day or two. 
I’m disappointed in Paul Constant’s review of Myles’ “Importance…Iceland.” Why is she a “brilliant stylist”? That’s just asserted. If she writes about “anything that appeals to her at the moment,” why isn’t that sloppy dilettantism? “Bold in her truth telling,” how? In which ways? I found Mr. Constant regresses to “fanzine” writing, e.g. “sentences come from out of nowhere to slap the reader…”. Really? Isn’t it worth asking why readers might want to be slapped, if that is in fact someone’s desire? Finally, if Mr. Constant affirms that Myles “invites” readers to “join her up in the clouds for a day or two,” well, I’d like to know how that invite connects with the assertion by Mr. Constant that this book is a “raw memoir.” Raw clouds? Cloudy raw?
Sande Cohen
Seattle
books is my life
in re the first comment above:
Constant wrote that Myles’s first book “Cool for You” is a raw memoir, NOT the book under review (“Importance…Iceland”) in which he says she invites readers to join her in the clouds.