Nonfiction
Home
AMERICAN WRITERS REMEMBER ROOMS OF THEIR OWN
Edited by Sharon Sloan Fiffer and Steve Fiffer. Pantheon. 235 pp. $22.
When we think of our childhood, and of our families, we are also often thinking of the place we knew as home, the setting for the rituals and dramas that define a family. In "Home" Sharon and Steve Fiffer have assembled original essays by 18 contemporary American writers, each a recollection of some one room from their past. Not surprisingly, these rooms have come to carry a good deal of symbolic weight. The naturalist Sallie Tisdale writes about the basement in her grandmother's house, clean but haphazardly piled with all the debris of past life that her grandmother could not bear to discard. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the scholar and the author most recently of "Colored People, A Memoir," remembers his parent's living room, and more particularly the television set that dominated it, drawing the family together each night, functioning like a fireplace in the proverbial New England winter.
Not all of the essays deal with the authors' childhoods, though most do. Colin and Kathryn Harrison, husband and wife (both are novelists), contribute a set of nicely matching essays, he on their bedroom and the manner in which their small children have made the room their own, she on the children's room nearby. The novelist Susan Power contributes a moving piece about the extraordinary things brought to light when she and her mother explored her grandmother's attic, discovering letters and journals a century old, releasing "a legion of ghosts, a chain of lives." Mona Simpson recreates the kitchen in her grandmother's house (in further testament to our unsettled times, many of the middle-aged writers in the collection spent at least part of their childhood living with grandparents). Jane Smiley meditates on the qualities that go to make a comfortable bathroom. The novelist Clint McCown writes about the events played out around the front door of the family home, and makes an essential point about all of these pieces: a particular setting gives us a frame to set our family in, a way "to call them all together at a place in time."
One of the pleasures of an anthology is the way in which the voices play off against one another. One of the drawbacks is the inevitable unevenness of any collection. Both points apply to "Home," but even given the cryptic or fragmentary nature of some of the essays, the book is often enough sad or haunting or funny or startling to repay a reading.
Adcult USA
THE TRIUMPH OF ADVERTISING IN AMERICAN CULTURE
By James Twitchell Columbia University Press. $24.95.
"Two to five year olds," James Twitchell observes, "average more than 28 hours of television a week." That means that "assuming they reach maturity with consciousness intact, the current crop of teenagers will have spent years watching commercials." The statistics are as appalling for adults. "In 1915 a person could go entire weeks without observing an ad. The average adult today sees some 3,000 every day." How did this happen and, more importantly, why?
"Adcult USA" is not one more in a long line of works excoriating ad agencies for their influence on American culture. That isn't because Mr. Twitchell, a professor of English at the University of Florida and the author of several other works on American pop culture, including "Preposterous Violence: Fables of Aggression in Modern Culture" and "Carnival Culture: The Trashing of Taste in America," intends to let them off the hook. It's just that he believes it's too easy to pin all of the blame on those who make and pay for the ads that inundate us.
After all, the majority of what we see makes no immediate impression on us, (The American Association of Advertising Agencies estimates that of those 3,000 ads we see daily, only about a dozen have even a fleeting effect.) To make sense of our culture, Mr. Twitchell argues, we are going to have to accept the fact that "we like being advertised to." We like consuming. Through five heavily illustrated chapters, "Adcult" traces the modern evolution of advertising and attempts to unravel the complex ways in which deception (theirs) and desire (ours) have intertwined to create the weird modern climate in which ads have become an unquestioned part of our lives.
Mr. Twitchell is a gadfly, clearly delighting in twitting just about everyone, from credulous consumers to the people who make a very good (if nerve-wracking) living by inventing new ways to seduce and deceive their fellow citizens. His approach is necessarily scattershot (it's a large topic) and his attempts to cover as much ground as possible sometimes leads to cryptic or outrageously sweeping remarks. Despite that, "Adcult USA" is a generally unsettling, witty and shrewd guide to a culture in which advertising has become not so much a way of selling merchandise but a way in which we define (and celebrate) what we are -- or what we would like to be.
