"When I first flipped through Monson’s, uh, not-memoir, I dismissed his writing style as an ostentatious rip-off of essayist and novelist David Foster Wallace. Some chapters are flooded with endless footnotes, while others are written in three columns, some with no margins. Each chapter is littered with small “crosslike glyphs,” (daggers and double daggers) highlighting certain words in the text that, on first glance, appear to lead nowhere. Generally, I’m a proponent of storytellers who use streamlined language to say exactly what they mean. I usually dismiss flowery writing, and especially flowery formatting, as pretentious and unnecessary. I now realize this was a very unfair conclusion to make about Vanishing Point before reading it.
Monson’s not-memoir is a collection of nineteen essays, some of which originally appeared in The Believer, Indiana Review, and other literary magazines. A few of the essays contain photos of found objects like letters and photographs. The essay subjects don’t seem to fit together at first: jury duty, Doritos, Dungeons and Dragons, a YouTube video of a college a cappella group. But the fun of Vanishing Point is that after reading layer after layer of Monson’s seemingly mundane experiences, the reader is left with a surprisingly complete idea of both who the author is and why we read memoirs in the first place." (more)
