Quick Review

Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings by Craig Brown

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


No one other than the occasional modernist poet ever seems to have had the slightest problem with the obvious contrivance of poetic form.  What's a sestina or a villanelle after all but an artificial, indeed, arbitrary set of rules?  Indeed, some of the greatest poetry ever written, most of it I should think, conforms to one form or another, and while I've heard of and even read some explanation of what makes a sonnet a sonnet, and even why make a sonnet, I can't recall what if any explanation's been offered as to why a sonnet in the first place or where that first place was.  I can't say I'd care one way or another.  Like most people, I should think, I enjoy a sonnet much as I enjoy a superior cocktail; with only a passing curiosity as to the finer points of it's making.  (The poet as bartender.  Not so bad, that.)  Here the author has not only devised an ingenious premise: A meets B who met C who meets D, etc., and then, presumably just to complicate matters for himself, each of the 101 meetings is described in exactly 1001 words.  None of this matters in the least to the reader, or to this reader at least, other than to add a little to the fun of the thing for all concerned.

I've seen some terribly serious reviews of this book that seem to either disapprove of this sort of wilful nonsense or to have made entirely too much of it, considering the fundamentally frivolous nature of the whole enterprise.  Why?  Perfectly good nonfiction has been made by equally talented writers by painting themselves into equally tight corners before -- telling history in a day, for example, or in rhyme, or reviewing existence in considering just the thumb -- so I'm not sure why these harmless, and entirely self-invented restrictions need mean anything at all.

For me, the great fun here is just the dizzying parade of personalities, in one interesting, unlikely and or awkward encounter after another.  Some, like Groucho Marx & T. S. Eliot may be familiar to fans of either gentleman, while others, Madonna and Martha Graham for instance, I would never otherwise have imagined.  It helps, I should think, to know something of the celebrities involved, but Brown is expert enough in just one thousand and one words a go to tell the reader what he or she needs to know to enjoy each encounter.

This is actually one of those rare books of anecdotal biography I've actually kept open longer than it could possibly have taken me to read the whole thing at a go, just for the fun of having more to read.  All good things come, alas, to their ends at last, so all I can hope for now would be... a sequel?  Why not?  The rules of the game clearly allow for almost endless play.  Here's hoping Craig Brown agrees.



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