Four Personal Stories/Essays

Of the four pieces we read: The Inheritance of Tools; I, Nature Boy; Mister Lytle: An Essay; and Say Hello to my Little Friend, my favorites were Nature Boy and Mister Lytle. Very different reads, voices, and contours in their telling but both are full of wonderful detail and personal reflection.

Nature Boy made me laugh out loud. Rakoff was the perfect foil to the story he was telling and made maximum use of his personal preferences in contrast to the dogma of the survival school. Rakoff gets us right there with him but never takes himself or the "school" too seriously. Instead of destroying the mood, his personal zingers add a needed perspective and distance from the alien intimacy of the survival experience. The characters we meet are fully realized as is he as a particpant/observor.

Like Rakoff, JJ Sullivan is also an uncanny and unexpected participant who finds himself out of his comfort zone and in unusual circumstance. Neither writer really knew what they were signing up for but were game to what came their way. Each could stand back and appreciate the humor of their odd but informing circumstances.

While Nature Boy occurs over the span of a week and feels almost real time, Mister Lytle covers more than a year and takes us back and forwards in extended periods of time, almost as if we were plopped down in a time continuum, which is a nice pairing with his subject - an almost 93 year old man with an illustrious past. Lytle's past is fertile terrain for plucking anecdotes about the south, about a literary circle, and sexual mores. Sullivan puts all of this background to good use as he himslef sorts out his life and the beginnings of his own career as a writer and of his love for the woman he will marry.

The other two pieces, The Inheritance of Tools and Say Hello to my Little Friend, are well-crafted but did not engage me as much. I missed the self-depricating humor that worked so well in Nature and Lytle. Felt like they worked too hard to make their points. Tools went on too long and felt repetitious.