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I encountered Antoine Wilson at the BEA, where I had gone to find out which adult titles had all the buzz, and why, on behalf of Publishing Perspectives.  Quick on his feet, witty, Antoine was, nonetheless, the author of a book about a "slow absorber"�a 28 year old named Oppen Porter who is recording every millimeter of minutiae about his life and thoughts for the benefit of his unborn son, whom Oppen doesn't expect to meet, stuck as Oppen is, in a hospital, and perhaps dying.  I would need to add a few more commas to that last sentence, a smattering of additional half-steps, not to mention some unexpected profundities, they would have to be funny profundities, but also true, in the way that funny is also true, except that I am personally incapable of conjuring either the profound or the funny, in order to foreshadow the nature of the novel itself, which I have just finished reading, in order to give you a sense for the whole. Or one small sentence of the whole.

I would have to be Antoine Wilson, but I am not.  I would have to be a literary ventriloquist with an obsession with the question, What is a man of the world?, but this is Wilson's terrain.  His Oppen is a Forrest Gump of sorts (minus the super-hero powers and the awesome historic coincidences)—optimistic, well-meaning, highly observant but also stuck in his observing, capable of seeing a lot of the picture, but perhaps not the same picture that so many of us see (because we are rushing, because we have conformed, because we have ceded something of the raw and unschooled in ourselves).  The novel is a monologue, a man talking into a tape recorder while his baby sits coiled within his gold- and white-toothed mom.  It is a circle, and while riding the circle, one meets fast-food workers, big thinkers, exasperated aunts (all right, just one single exasperated aunt), religious zealots, and a talking-cure shrink who cures nothing. 

I'm going to share here three sentences of Oppen's world.  Oppen is tall, you see, and his sleeping arrangements are unfortunate.  He's finding himself slightly fatigued:

I'm not a complainer, I wouldn't have said anything, except that I was concerned I wasn't going to be getting enough rest, that over the course of several nights the lack of rest would add up to a general fatigue, it had happened to me before, it had happened to me in Madera, when I had broken my arm, or rather my arm had gotten broken while playing Smear the Queer with the Alvarez brothers, I had fallen in an awkward way, and because of the cast and the way it was situated I could not roll over freely in my sleep, and as a result I suffered from what your grandfather called general fatigue, which he said was quite noticeable with me, what happened was that in addition to having less energy I was less interested in everything and less friendly, too, I wasn't myself.  At the time I did not know the root cause of the general fatigue but I have since come to realize that without sleep the head gets clogged with other people's words.  The head needs sleep to make everyone else's words into our own words again, it is a conversion process.

One final thing.  Panorama City is a Lauren Wein (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) book.  Lauren, whom I am proud to say is a friend, continues to produce some of the most interesting books around.  Read Shards, if

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I'll be headed to London in a few days for a very quick trip and so, in typical Beth style, I am trying to complete every single task on every single list before I get on that plane.  Stupid, I know.

That means that the last few days have been consumed with the writing of the second draft of a commemorative book for a client, the back-and-forthing with an insurance agent, the prepping for a school visit at the Eighth Grade Center @ Springford, the watching of a documentary about graffiti, the blogging about Ismet Prcic's debut novel Shards, the writing of stories for a client news magazine, the neglect of a few emails I still have to write, the repolishing of my nails, the development of a plan to put my William novel into the world, the forgetting to pick up the dry cleaning, the thinking through of my spring Penn course, the preparation for the upcoming Jill Lepore lecture at Villanova University (wait, how does one prepare?), the reading of the first two chapters of The Art of Fielding because it is about time, the cooking of a dinner that could have been better, the reading of a friend's forthcoming novel, the writing of verse for our holiday card, the realization that the roof is leaking again, and the completion of an adult novel that has been in the works for years.  I also purchased a few early holiday gifts and made the decision—an emphatic one—that I do not like shopping.  No, I do not.

{For those, who, understandably, plan to read no further, please note (see below) that this tongue-in-cheekish list was produced to make a larger point.}

In the midst of all of this, I paged through (lightning speed) the December 5 issue of Newsweek.  (Frankly, I still have a lot of questions about this new iteration of Newsweek, but those questions are for another day.)  I stopped at page 61, the Omnivore page, where Diablo Cody and Charlize Theron look out upon the reader.  The story is called "The Narcissist Decade," and it's an essay Cody has penned in anticipation of the December 9 release of her film "Young Adult."

"Young Adult," as it turns out, is about a not-very-nice seeming young adult author.  Cody tells us:  "Mavis's humble peers possess something that eludes her more each year:  growth.  They've matured into seasoned adults with perspective and humility, while Mavis continues to flail in a self-created hell of reality TV, fashion magazines, blind dates, and booze."

(I sincerely hope that Mavis is not meant as a stand-in for all YA authors.  I sincerely hope that.  I do.)

In any case, later on in the essay, Cody, whose husband has told her that she shares a number of traits with Mavis (an assertion Cody at first denies), goes on to suggest that perhaps we are all narcissists.

Before you get as offended as I did, allow me to explain.  Sure, we're not all deranged homewreckers in pursuit of past glory.  But if the era of Facebook and Twitter has fed any monsters, it's those of vanity, self-obsession, and immaturity.  Who among us hasn't Googled an ex, or measured our own online social circle against that of a perceived rival, or snapped multiple "profile photos" in an attempt to find the best angle?  Who hasn't caught herself watching an episode of "Jersey Shore" and thought, "I'm a grown-up. Why am I con

6 Comments on Am I a Narcissist?, last added: 11/30/2011

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kelly said, on 11/30/2011 4:43:00 AM

You are not a N--ist. You are simply "timesheeting" . . .the tendency of the self-employed to enumerate the tasks of the day, if only to marvel at the absurdity of them!

Melissa Sarno said, on 11/30/2011 6:23:00 AM

I agree with Kelly that looking at the absurdity of life (or just life in general as in a blog, a memoir, or a facebook status) is not necessarily narcissistic. The way you do it shows you are thoughtful and that you care about the things you experience.

Michael G-G said, on 11/30/2011 6:31:00 AM

Well, if you are a narcissist, then we all are.

And, for good measure, we all have ADD. (Or so my conversation yesterday with a couple of school mothers at our sons' swimming lessons would lead me to believe.)

Serena said, on 11/30/2011 6:45:00 AM

I think that enumerating events on Facebook in and of itself is not narcissistic, but the act of checking back and counting the comments on those updates is narcissistic....that one would care that much that they are loved...but in turn not seeing a satisfactory amount of comments could also be detrimental to the psyche of the supposed narcissist -- so perhaps they are not narcissistic after all but masochistic. ;) (wink)

Becca said, on 11/30/2011 7:35:00 AM

I wonder sometimes about this new compulsion to share so much of ourselves and our lives. Is it narcissism or a longing for connection?

I want to read this essay you speak of.

Amy said, on 11/30/2011 9:37:00 AM

There might be a little narcissist in us all, who knows? But I agree with other commenters that there might be other reasons for these things.

I can't see that YA movie bc of the premise of using YA as a sign of never growing up.

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Two nights ago, just after I'd slipped the steaks onto their plates, a gold-dipped wine glass tumbled from a top cabinet shelf, just like that.  I hadn't touched it.

The glass, the gold, scattered to all ends of the kitchen and out into the hall.  I spent a long time collecting the pieces, and then yesterday, illuminated by the spot of sun that wedges through the front door, I discovered that the shards had multiplied overnight; they were still there, still bristling with danger.

I was thinking of that shattered glass early this morning as I finished reading Shards, the debut novel by Ismet Prcic.  I bought this book because I know Lauren Wein, its editor.  I bought it because others have expressed their astonishment.  I bought it because it has the word "propulsive" in the jacket copy.  I like that word.  It doesn't belong to me or my work, it may not ever, but it absolutely belongs to Prcic and Shards.

My word, where to begin?  First, as I noted here in a previous post, you're not going to find many sentences in any book, anywhere, like the sentences you find here.  One after the other after the other.  Prcic makes use of preposterous and somehow dead-on analogies and allusions, profanities and profundities.  He celebrates the hieroglyphs of punctuational tics, smears words, elevates typefaces, deploys footnotes, diary entries, memoirisms, blasphemy, theater, treachery, vulgarisms, and you know what?  It works.  It's not cute.  It's not invention for invention's sake.  It's not ponderous:  Prcic needs every thing that language surrenders to tell his heartbreaking, rude, surprisingly compassionate, and still violent story about a Bosnian refuge who is trying to make sense of his new life in southern California.  What did Prcic (for indeed, that is the character's name) leave behind?  Who did he leave behind?  At what cost, his own survival?

I could write a mile-long review and fail at explaining this book.  Frankly, I think any reviewer would feel the same way, or should.  There's an easy explanation for this lack of explanation:  this book cannot be explained.  It is to be experienced.  Sentence by sentence, scene by scene.  I quoted a favorite early passage in that blog post of the other day.  Here I'll quote another:

Movies don't do it justice—that's all I'm going to say about the thought-collapsing, breath-stealing sound a spinning shell makes as it pierces the air on the way down toward the center of your town, in between three of the busiest cafes and a little bit to the right of the popcorn vendor in the midst of hundreds of citizens who are pretending that everything is okay, that the war is winding down.  But I didn't know that yet.

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Ever since Dana Spiotta reviewed Shards in the The New York Times Book Review a few weeks ago, I have been eager to get a copy for myself. Consider, here, what Dana says:

The novel is constructed of fragments — shards — seemingly written by its main character, Ismet Prcic. Ismet grows up in Tuzla and manages to flee shortly before his induction into the “meat grinder” of the Bosnian infantry. He has survived and made his way to America, but is fractured by what he left behind. The novel comprises mostly segments from his therapist- ordered memoir (or memoirs) and excerpts from his diary. These shards employ several narrative strategies. There are asterisked footnotes, italicized interruptions and self-reflexive comments about unreliability. There are first-, second- and third-person narrations, sometimes switching back and forth within a paragraph. This is a novel about struggling to find form for a chaotic experience. It pushes against convention, logic, chronology. But its disruptions are necessary. How do you write about war and the complications of memory? How do you write about dislocation, profound loneliness, terror? How does a human persevere?

Truth is, I'd been eager to read Ismet Prcic's debut novel ever since I sat in the office of Lauren Wein, the book's editor, and listened to her read aloud from the opening passage.  The book had only recently been released as advance reading copies and, judging from the number of brilliantly hued sticky notes attached to many of the pages, Lauren was still giving this book her extraordinary editorial attentions.  I loved the sound of what she had read to me.  I could not wait to read more.  And then, caught up in the crazy swirl of my own life, I did wait, not buying the book until just recently.

I am only into the early pages at this point. I am not, as I thought I might be, intimidated by the hybrid of forms, techniques, approaches.  The word "propulsive" has been attached to this book, and that it is, but the book is remarkably resonant, too, often funny, surprisingly accessible, despite all that is original and new.  Here is an early-in example:

I love a girl, Melissa.  Her hair oozes like honey.  It's orange in the sun.  She loves me, mati.  She's American.  She goes to church.  She wears a cross right where her freckles disappear into her cleavage.  She volunteers.  She takes forty minutes to scramble eggs over really low heat, but when they're done they explode in your mouth like fireworks, bursts of fatty yolk and coarse salt and cracked pepper and sharp melted cheddar and something called thyme.  She's sharp.  She drives like a lunatic.  She's capable of both warmth and coldness, and just hanging around her to see what it will be that day is worth it.

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