Life Work
author: Donald Hall
name: Paul
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1993
rating: 3
read at: 2012/05/07
date added: 2012/05/08
shelves: memoir, non-fiction
review:
Let’s assume you were wondering if there was ever a market for blogging before the semi-coherent daily ramble became a legitimate form of communication ten or twelve years ago. To confirm this, you need look no further than Donald Hall‘s Life Work, a semi-topical serialized set of quasi-daily ruminations on the subject of work, self, life, death, family, history and the intersections of all the above. Written in the very early nineties, this book is a blog, regardless of whatever memoir title might be attached to it. The short essay formatting, the tangental discussions on a broad central theme; the only things missing are ironic hyperlinks and the occasional “sorry I haven’t posted in a while, I’ll be better soon, I promise!” entires.
I was assigned Life Work as a part of an English course I took during one of my failed attempts at college. This would be back in like 1996, when the web was just starting to be ubiquitous and when the notion of an online life was still mostly science fiction. In that time, which sounds quaint to describe and depresses me greatly to think of a time less than twenty years ago as such, the notion of a person spending an hour or more a day on actual post mail as opposed to email or Twitter or whatever was still current enough to not seem strange. Reading the book now, it kind of boggles my mind to know that something so central to communication when I was not even just a small child but a teenager, a near-adult, has all but been antiquated. Hall describes his work, his idealized day involving the anticipation of a day spent working on poems and essays and letters and books, then relaxing with his wife and attending to various chores come evening. He describes the workdays of his parents, his grandparents and great-grandparents. He talks about work in a general sense, he talks about it in great detail.
You can tell that Hall is a poet; his prose and essay stylings are peppered with dips into lyrical rhapsodies. He’s also kind of hard to like sometimes: he is stuffy and pretentious one moment and then grounded and rootsy the next. I kind of liked that he manages to convey the complexity of a real person by preserving the daily shift in tone and mood, in refusing the temptation to not edit down or smooth over these transitory notes. Still, there are a lot of points where Hall’s topic of work, as presented in this proto-blog format, become a kind of slushy non-thesis, weighed down by specifics that I don’t think anyone asked for.
Partway through the book, Hall deals with a health crisis, which puts a new spin on the topic (and a welcome one, though saying so sounds absolutely terrible I know), propelling the end of the book through with a renewed urgency that adds a nice edge to the languid tone of the first half. I did like that Hall kind of sold me (as if I needed selling) on the quiet life of the comfortable country writer; his depictions of an unhurried New England life ignited both my aspirational drive as well as some wanderlust to explore the semi-rural areas of Vermont and New Hampshire he creates in mental landscapes. Perhaps these places don’t or never did exist, but I’d like to go and see for myself.
And maybe, then, this is the final success of the book. In a collection of meandering essays about living and working, Hall has made me interested in doing both, doing more with each, and finding a happier junction where the two—inevitably, as Hall believes—meet.