“The world still wants its poet-priest,” wrote Emerson in 1850, “a reconciler.” It is reconciliation that guides John D’Agata’s curious, moving first book, Halls of Fame. Perched at the axis of competing traditions—the breathless lists, Adamic wonder, and emerging dialectic of Whitman’s lineation versus the neo-Platonic analogue of Emerson’s prose—D’Agata’s collection of lyrical essays reconfigures Romantic iconography through the lens of American expansion: westward and capitalist. D’Agata’s trajectory originates with the world’s largest Aeolian harp, the Hoover Dam, and culminates in the 210,000-watt sublimity of Las Vegas. In between, he curates a sideshow exhibit of fringe dwellers and visionaries: flat-Earth devotees, Martha Graham, Henry Darger, insomniacs. D’Agata is a sympathetic reporter. Still, there is something unsettled and unsettling in the author’s stance as Whitmanic superconductor: “Which means I’m their eyes…but not their interpreter,” he writes of his work “translating” dance to the blind, knowing, surely, that what he chooses to describe is itself interpretation. And while the impulse here is the familiar drive toward the lyrical-transcendent, it is always belated or a bit pre-fab; we find monuments to wonder rather than wonder itself. Even the world’s brightest light, at Vegas’s Luxor Hotel, has dimmed by the time D’Agata arrives: “I go home and look up,” his guide says, “and I’m like ‘Where is it?'” This same disappointment pulls at all of D’Agata’s characters, partly because it is inscribed in the form of the essays. As Mutlu Konuk Blasing wrote, “the knowledge of circularity condemns gods and poets; the same knowledge saves humans and essayists,” and in this lies both the book’s strength and its (necessary) failure. The surface drama of Halls of Fame may be lyrical, but its intelligence lies in its understanding of the constant recycling of our entrepreneurial and creative energy, or our recursive failure and redemption. These essays, which can’t transcend but long to, tirelessly embody this same energy: “Surely the heart must break before we can begin to feel.”
