Country: USA
Genre: Non-Fiction/Essays
Pages: 204 kb (eOriginal)
Buy 99 PROBLEMS here
Other Ben Tanzer Books Reviewed:
My Father's House (2011)
So Different Now (2011)
I don't know much about being Zen or managing the clutter in my head; but here, now, my mind is no doubt as relaxed as it will be all day. I start to think about writing, beginning with this essay, and my desire to not only free-associate about the experience and maybe look back over my life, but to capture the physical landscape as well, which at this morning looks not just like upstate New York, but and amalgam or Portland and Seattle too, other places I have run where the skies are gray, the air is damp and the streets are tree-lined.
I am one of the few, proud and indomitable Ben Tanzer fan. We are not many now, but we will soon conquer the publishing world, when our champion will be called "a more sensitive spin on Jonathan Franzen" or "a perfectly acceptable compromise between Raymond Carver and Haruki Murakami" by the New York Times. Although, the biggest obstacle in Ben Tanzer's path to literary superstardom is himself. There is always one thing wrong with his books. Sometimes it's ridiculously short or sometimes the ideas feel a little rushed. It's not easy, aiming high as he does, because real life and artistic longings often go in different directions. He blew me away with SO DIFFERENT NOW, so I picked up his essay collection 99 PROBLEMS, since I'm both a sucker for Tanzer's work and a good essay. In a bizarre twist of fate, 99 PROBLEMS ended up being everything I like and don't like about Ben Tanzer. Where does that leave me? About the same place where I started.
First of all, I'd hardly call 99 PROBLEMS a collection of essays. It's a series of musings about the relationships between writing and running. There essay form merely allows Tanzer to explore different themes and structure his thoughts around a series of runs he made. It's a herculean challenge he set for himself, since it's very difficult to draw parallels between writing and anything. It's a skill, often romanticized and made into some kind of transcendent activity, but truth is, whatever you do aside writing is time not spent writing. Tanzer says in the first essay he's looking to pick up where Haruki Murakami left off with WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING, and try to compare both activities rather than expose the poetics of running and in a sense, reading 99 PROBLEMS is a great complement to Murakami's runner's companion, because it gives perspective on the issues the Japanese master might've encountered while writing it.
There are two kinds of essays to Tanzer's book. Those who work and those who don't. When it works, it's an absolute pleasure to read. A GUY WHO KNOWS A GUY was my favorite, as I almost forgot I was lost into a runner's thoughts while reading it. While I do not believe writing to be a transcendent activity, I do think running is and Tanzer exposes it in this essay, where he starts with physical sensations and slowly crosses into an ethereal trail of thoughts. VICTORY, which is about an actual race, also is quite remarkable. Tanzer says running helps writing, because it liberates oneself from a clutter of thoughts and he's absolutely right. Most physical activity, when performed with enough intensity does. The proper of running, what makes it appealing to writers, is that it's ascetical. It's an exercise in solitude. It's just you, the road and your thoughts, working a rhythm.
I could tell you that I don't look down on people hitting the treadmill this time of year, but I would be lying. That's not running; that's exercise. It's healthy and beneficial, but it's not running.
Reading Ben Tanzer's 99 PROBLEMS, I understood his point, his need to make a stand about running and writing. Was this collection necessary though? I doubt it. At least, it wasn't ready to be. Tanzer's colloquial style doesn't bode very well to the essay form and it often seems like he's juggling with his ideas, unsure from which angle to take them. Whenever Tanzer talks about writing or running alone, the magic is there, but whenever he tries to explicitly make links, his prose becomes confused and messy. There are things not meant to be explicit. I'm growing older and I realize that. Haruki Murakami realized it also while writing WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING. It's something that cannot be diluted and separated into clearly defined concepts. 99 PROBLEMS is a failed experiment, but its inherent meaning will contribute to further writing in that field and I can only command Ben Tanzer for tackling such a problematic subject. I'd love to see him take another swipe at it maybe five or ten years down the line.
TWO STARS