Failure

[Kyle]

I read this book for a summer course and thought it was very well-written. The “jumping around” didn’t bother me as much as it seemed to bother other readers because I was confident that D’Agata would tie all of these disjunctive ideas up at the end. However, when he didn’t do that to my satisfaction, that’s where I became confused and – I’ll admit it – disappointed. Who writes a book (or a lyric essay, for that matter) about a problem and then doesn’t offer solutions to that problem by the end?

What was brought to my attention, though, was that perhaps that was D’Agata’s intention: not to bring up a variety of topics to confuse and overwhelm the reader, but to bring to the readers’ attention that failure – his own as well as that of the jumbled ideas and topics that were touched on – is something that doesn’t really have a solution, because like nearly everything on earth, failure changes depending on how you look at it.

Overall, the essay was engaging and informative, thoughtful and confusing: a successful failure.