Wilsey, Sean. Oh the Glory of It All. New York: Penguin, 2006.

Now that it's the summer I'm supposed to be reading and blogging regularly. And I'm not, though! A few excuses: my writing abilities have been so scattershot lately that when I feel them being, like, good, I put it all on my taxidermy stuff. Here's an example: in the opening sentence to this post I tossed some words around in my end to end it more "creatively" and the first/only thing I could come up with was simply awful (cross out regularly and insert "with the regularity sought after by so many seniors"...that's right a bowel-movement joke).

Oh I need another excuse to justify that plural. Well I spent a week in a workshop with the writer of this book I'm trying to write about. It was his first time teaching, and while I didn't take the sort of notes I took when I had a workshop with Jim Shepard (a privilege any writer should donate body parts to earn), I had a good time. Wilsey's pedagogy stems from the "let's read this very long work of nonfiction and talk about how good it is." Sometimes such an approach is nice, especially when one is burned out on writing workshops (I think this is a form of success; sitting in a room and listening to people talk about writing techniques makes me not to want to think more about writing and its possibilities, it makes me want to leave the room and write).

I'm in the position again of reviewing a book written by someone I can maybe call a friend. I'll do my best. Wilsey's memoir begins with a great three sentences. "In the beginning we were happy. And we were always excessive. Therefore we were happy to excess." The kid was unimaginably rich, living in the penthouse of the San Francisco high rise his father owned, flying via his father's chopper to the Napa Valley house at which they weekended. Then his folks divorce and his life goes haywire.

Part two of the book tells the story of all the schools Wilsey was shipped around to, starting at an ultraelite New England prep school, which he failed out of. Then a New England boarding school for flunkies that he flunked out of. Then a crazy psychotic superChristian school he escaped from. Then an enlightened school that saved his life. Fortunately for him, it's in Tuscany.

I skipped through much of this section. I gave this book an unfair reading because of my own ideas about rich people. At first I was all, "Okay so I'll need to find a way to care about this person's problems when he has incredible amounts of money at his disposal," and watching young Wilsey be used grossly as a pawn in his parents' divorce (his father almost immediately remarried his mother's best friend, who almost immediately became a total ruthless C-word) was enough for me to give him all the sympathy he deserved. Plus the details are so good.

But I don't think his difficulty in schools makes for a compelling narrative. I'm in a living room in Virginia right now and my copy of the book is, last time I saw it, in my office in Nebraska, so I can't give you an example. We watch as Wilsey befriends an impopular kid then sees how to strategically publicly destroy this kid in order to make better friends, then to feel some remorse about it. It's every high school narrative, transposed to rich-kid milieus.

The final section of the book synthesizes the antithesis of his boyhood's thesis, if I can be allowed to destroy whatever a Hegelian dialectic is. Again, I'd give you some idea of how, but I Finished! this like two weeks ago, if not more. My midyear resolution is just to sit down and write about a book right when I Finish! it. It's not like any of you are looking for quality, you just want this thing updated with the regularity of an infant not yet switched to solid foods.