An Uncommon Talent: Kevin Sampsell's A Common Pornography

I pause to recommend a new book I didn't like.

This, given what I do for a living, is not actually all that uncommon. Do it all the time. Were I in the bookstore where I work just now, I'm confident I could recommend books on any of the following subjects about which I could not actually be made to care:

Knitting
Curt Cobain
Fly-fishing
Lithuanian poetry

Okay. Maybe not that last one. (Not even Google or Nancy Pearl could help me there, I think.) But I would try.

The point being that, as a bookseller, it is a substantial part of what I do; connecting readers unlike myself with books I need not like. It would disingenuous to suggest I'd read every book I might recommend in the course of the day, or that I had any intention of ever knowing more than the little I may have inadvertently come to know about Antarctic exploration, for example, which to my mind is just the unappetizing story, repeated entirely too often, of people going where they really ought not and getting, frankly, just what they deserved. Doesn't mean there's anything wrong with me recommending books about this to the people who enjoy reading that kind of thing. Hardly an ethical quandary for someone in retail. Doesn't mean there's anything wrong with those readers, either. A particular favorite of mine, the English novelist, Nancy Mitford, adored reading books about Captain Scott, Ernest Shackleton and the like. That would be something I only know because I've read all her published letters, which happen to be very much more to my taste than, say, Heart of the Antarctic. Doesn't matter. In Heretics, Chesterton famously said, "There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person." When it comes to gentlemen dying heroically or otherwise on ice, fair to say, I am uninterested. Doesn't mean I can afford to be wholly disinterested though. So, I read a little at least what I don't like. Part of the job. Necessity. I've certainly sold more people on Caroline Alexander's Endurance than I ever convinced to read Mitford's letters. I'd like to think I haven't done anyone a disservice by only finishing one of those two books. That's what bookselling allows me to do, if I'm any good at it; read things I otherwise never would so that I might talk to people who ought to, learn something of people unlike myself, and make a very modest living at it. What matters is knowing what's good, even what's best, even if it isn't something I like.

Kevin Sampsell, the author of A Common Pornography: A Memoir, being a bookseller himself, would understand this. I don't know Mr. Sampsell, though I may well have encountered him at some point, as he works in one of my favorite bookstores, Powell's, in Portland. No reason I'd know that about him, or anything else, had I not had occasion recently to read his new book. I'm glad I did, though as I've already suggested, I didn't entirely enjoy the experience.

Kevin Sampsell likes things I clearly don't. He likes music to which I would never willingly listen, he reads books, presumably, it would never occur to me to read, and what's more, he publishes, at his own press, Future Tense Publishing, authors of whom I would never otherwise have heard. I've actually read some of these now, because I read Sampsell's book. He knows what he's about. His taste, while not mine, is clearly admirable.

Taste. As a memoirist, Kevin Sampsell could be accused of having very bad taste indeed, or at least of being indiscreet in a shockingly unappetizing, even heartless way. No one in his new memoir, which is almost all to do with his childhood and immediate family, on the evidence of this one book, could be described as having any taste that wasn't bad, even the author. There's not a room, not a meal, not a song, not a relationship, not a conversation that doesn't sound godawful. There isn't one ugly thing that might have been overlooked in the author's life, or his sister's, or his sister's living room, for that matter, that escapes mention. In fact, I can't remember the last time I read a book with more ugliness in it.

And yet, Kevin Sampsell has written a beautiful book. I can say that, having read the book straight through now, twice, without apology for not having liked the book. It isn't, I suspect, the kind of book one is meant to like. Doesn't mean it isn't good.

Wilde said, "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written." Kevin Sampsell's memoir, whatever else it is, is well written, though even here, I should amend that statement by adding that the book is written in a style I can not like. Seventy-some years ago, the British critic, Cyril Connolly, wrote a very influential book called Enemies of Promise. In it, he described the triumph of modernism and the vanquishing of what he brilliantly and brutally dubbed the "Mandarins," meaning the fussy insincerity and affectations of style that had dead-ended English literature in a kind of bloodless, drawing-room politeness. Dishonesty, Connolly felt, was the only natural result of a discretion that had come to stifle sincerity all but entirely, and a style that had become so refined as to end by saying nothing of the slightest importance or relevance to modern readers. Neither Connolly nor the modernists might have anticipated a time when nothing might not be said just because it probably shouldn't be, or the popularity of a style, the most admired aspect of which would be the flat philistinism of the prose. Yet, here we are.

If I were to write about the faux wood panelling in my parent's double-wide, I would feel an obligation to at least defend the aspirational triumph represented by my parent's first and only "new" house. What's more, I should probably do so in just such a clumsy, pendulous sentence as this. The most obvious reason to do so would be to spare something of my family's feelings, though it is unlikely that anyone in my family would ever read this. Then there might well be some shallowness of character on my part that would need to reassure my readers that I know perfectly well how aesthetically doubtful even the most expensive prefab is likely to be. Finally, I should be genuinely afraid of boring anyone with what might seem a careless description of an ugly fact, unalleviated by either humor or at least the suggestion of something of interest about that plywood environment beyond my personal experience and or my own distaste.

Setting whatever motive aside, what Sampsell does, something that I never could, is trust in the story he's decided to tell, to the interest of his readers in the experience of a not all that unusual or interesting boy growing up in a profoundly uninteresting time and place, and in a family one can hardly envy, and in the seemingly neutral, even artless voice in which he has chosen to write. That last of course is what makes Sampsell's book so good, and what I actually like least about it. I find the facts of Sampsell's memoir all too boringly familiar, when they aren't actually horrifying or distasteful. I find his willingness-- even eagerness -- to expose his family's darkest secrets and dysfunctions less shocking, having watched more than my share of daytime TV talkshows, than depressingly inappropriate in a man nearly my own age, whose poor old mother is still alive. What I can not but admire, and yes, even envy, is the skillful, even masterly concision of the writer's prose. There's no other word for, at least that comes to mind tonight, but delicacy.

That one could write so gracefully, seemingly without affectation or obvious reference to his own, adult judgement and experience, so exactly in the voice of childhood, that the reader, this reader anyway, might never have had cause to doubt the veracity not only of the vignettes and short, anecdotal chapters from which the author has fashioned his book, but also the honesty of the writing, and the writer, is flatly amazing in a book of this kind. I know there is art in this. I can almost smell it. Take just his description of the day in the brief chapter, "Mt. Saint Helens," in which, without a wasted word, or a single beautiful phrase, Sampsell writes what could easily stand as a perfect, perfectly American, prose poem. Want to know what it was to be a boy living in Washington the week the top came off the mountain? There it is. Every detail, down to the named Gerber baby food jars in which the narrator and his classmates gathered ash from the sidewalks and car hoods, is right, even magical because, "Someone said the bottles would be worth money someday." That is exactly the logic of boys and how a source of astonishment is made understandable, commodified and sustained by childish aspirations to bottle the ineffable. The whole moment is then made more touching and true for the charmingly deflated conclusion:

"It was spring break when this happened, and when I went back to school the next week, everyone had bottles of ash to show."

What I can't do is recommend just these scenes of harmless, even sentimental wonder, because they do not occur in isolation from either the brutal reality of Sampsell's family life, or the author's determination to treat everything, good and bad, with the same careful, regretful passivity. Shit happens. I can't imagine the discipline required to break neither character nor mood and comment directly, as an adult, on what did. Kevin Sampsell the writer does comment, of course, on the pathetic mess his father in particular made of not only his life, but the ruin he left all around him, but the son only comments in the selection, the organization and the subtle cool with which he writes. It's disquieting, even disturbing, that cool.

But then, I've never known or really aspired to cool. I don't understand it. I fundamentally distrust it as a value. It is a kind of sophistication that has always seemed to me antithetical to either the good or the sustainable. Cool, to my mind, requires an isolation, most obviously from other people's judgements, but just as certainly from any sincere emotion other than the most visceral, a wariness of sentimentality and affectation that all too easily can become an affectation every bit as crippling and wearisome as ostentation and extravagance. There is no room, it seems to me, in all that blunt, brutal, fuck 'em-if-they-can't-take-the-truth honesty, for forgiveness; not of other people's sins, as it seems part and parcel of cool to barely acknowledge the capacity of other people to really affect, let alone undo cool, but forgiveness of self, of one's own sins. To whom would one's repentance be addressed?

Cool would seem to be the one thing in search of which the boy Kevin, like so many boys of roughly my generation and after, spent his youth. The writer, Kevin Sampsell, has it. No question. From what can be gleaned just from the memoir, he learned a certain cool from his best brother, or at least he admired in the elder boy what the younger still so obviously lacked. And Kevin just as clearly came to cool by means of a kind of trial and error common to all kids, but was lucky enough, or smart enough I suspect, to see music as the likeliest and quickest path to his goal. It is music that would seem to have saved him. Clearly, the boy had an ear. ( Just as clearly, from the sureness of his prose, he still does.) Once an aspiring musician and lyricist, Sampsell listened to the right stuff, and would seem to have read the right stuff, though he mentions this less frequently, to make a style that works so well as his.

(If, by the way, any young person should be confidently informed by anyone of of my generation that they did indeed listen to The Clash in high school, much as one would with someone of my husband's generation who insists he or she was at Woodstock, the youth should feel free to demand some kind of proof. At best, your dad probably had "Frampton Live" pounding his brains out through his giant headphones, while trying to master the chords on his unplugged electric guitar. And to be brutally frank, it's likelier Pops probably just had an acoustic guitar and the John Denver Songbook.)

So, my recommendation? I still can't say that A Common Pornography is not a good book. I've tried in fact to explain why I think it is, even if I don't like the damned thing. It isn't just that it is yet another exploration of suburban horrors, or that I can't be made to read suburban horrors. I've been reading a lot of that lately, actually, and not all of it looking for things that might give grown ups a bit of the old thrill of Halloween, come our October readings at the bookstore. The suburbia of Matthew Simmons, for example, can be pretty horrible, but at least in all the things of his I've liked best, it is weighted with a kind of allusive, folkloric nuttiness -- mom, being a golem dad made in the garage, for example, doesn't talk much -- so that what might otherwise be merely uncomfortable or uninterestingly proverbial, instead has a wonderfully weird, and childlike horror. Like Sampsell, I'd have to say that Simmons would seem to feel being at last all-grown-up as something of a shock. Neither still youngish writer would seem to have survived their adolescence without a certain terror of the oncoming adult world, and a persistent fondness for the lost innocence of magical thinking -- yet both would seem to share an enviably acute memory for the actual confusions, and joys, of childhood. That said, while Simmons' rhetoric can be every bit as blunt as Sampsell's, his writing seems tempered by a less self-consciously serious dignity. For me, reading Simmons, the pleasure of the thing has almost everything to do with the wit and aptness of his seemingly goofiest choices, his evident pleasure in the whole enterprise of invention, and finally, something of that that same cool confidence as a writer I admire so much in Sampsell. Obviously, Simmons shares Sampsell's, and perhaps their whole generation's fetish for economy, but with Simmons, there is a surprisingly happy propensity to giggle now and then, to break in as an entertainer, and run a little patter, or do a little, awkward white boy dancin', even as he proves he's quite the clever dick, too. Simmons' first novel, A Jello Horse, for all it's grim, 2010 hipness, in tones at least, might almost be an audio abridgment of On the Road as read by Fred Allen or Robert Benchley.

So it isn't just the fucked up, quotidian nastiness of Sampsell's family that makes me not like the book I'm recommending. I'm a big boy. I can take it. Really, it's that cool.

But, as I do know at least a few cool characters, including the afore mentioned Matthew Simmons, I can without hesitation recommend A Common Pornography, at least to them.