Halfbreed Literature

Whoa, thank the Lord, and Wayne Koestenbaum, for Hotel Theory.

I hate all the fiction I've been reading lately. Which is probably why I like Hotel Theory: it isn't quite fiction. It is a halfbreed: fiction meets essay meets, in some places, prose poem. Yes, I am using the derogatory term "halfbreed" on purpose. Everyone in VL had problems finding the book; either people went to bookstores that allegedly had it, but then the salespeople couldn't find it, or the store didn't have it, period.

I think it's funny and also depressing that we're so attached to genre that we can't imagine something that doesn't fit neatly in "fiction" or "nonfiction." That people who work in bookstores can't locate a book that isn't one thing or the other. I like to think that a halfbreed like Hotel Theory sneakily evades computer systems that want to categorize it, but more likely it's the computer system ignoring the halfbreed--people won't buy it, so why do we need to know where it is?

If I had a bookstore, there would be a section called "Halfbreed," and it would include all my favorite writers--like Diane Williams and Gertrude Stein and Calvino and Harry Mathews and Thomas Bernhard and Ben Marcus and Anne Carson and Nathalie Stephens and Mary Caponegro and Thalia Field. Or maybe my whole store would be called "Halfbreed." It would probably go under in about two weeks.

I complain all the time about the problem I have reading things lately. Reading makes me depressed and claustrophobic. I thought I had a problem reading because I was jealous of people who had books out, or of people who were brilliant.

But I discovered this morning, reading Hotel Theory without a lick of depression--with a feeling opposite claustrophobia, like my mind was opening up--that really I just want to read books that do more. For there to be more books out there that do more than make themselves marketable and readable--books that are capable of housing the whole world in all its forms.

I want books that are messier, that look new on the page, that make you question what they are. That don't fulfill my expectations of what a "novel," a "poem," a "story," an "essay" or a "play" is.

I want, I want, I want.