Amy Fusselman, _Idiophone: An Essay_

IT SURPRISED ME to see this long-listed in The Believer as a best non-fiction book of 2018, because I was under the impression it was poetry. Granted, my recents for thinking it poetry were superficial, i.e., each sentence gets its own line. No hanging indents, true, but the lineation effect is strong, and despite the book's subtitle, the text's free associations, its leaps into fantasy, its flirting with anaphora, and its general imaginative mobility seem much more poetic than essayistic.

Classification does not matter all that much, I suppose, until is a question of awards. There is no Believer Prize, nor Pulitzer nor National Book Award, for Best Unclassifiable Text. But wouldn't it be great if there was?

Idiophone tellingly reflects on its own unclassifiability:

I have had my balls busted, I tell you.
I have had my balls busted by mice rejecting my work.
I have had my balls busted by mice who say, "This is a problem:
your writing is not short stories,
it is not a novel,
it is nonfiction but it is not the kind of nonfiction we are used to,
it doesn't sound like poetry,
Just put it in a box, would you?
Just put it in a box so w can contain it?"

An "idiophone" is "a any musical instrument that creates sound primarily by the instrument as a whole vibrating--without the use of strings or membranes" (Wikipedia), like a cymbal or a triangle or the "slit gong" carved from a breadfruit tree that Fusselman ponders throughout the book.

Idiophone itself, we might say, is idiophonic, its sound the sound made when Fusselman's sensibility is struck, so to speak, by a memory, by a fantasy, by a circumstance. It's a sound that sounds only like itself, as a gong sounds only like a gong, so Idiophone is not a book that will much remind you of any other book. It's easy to fall for, though, as compulsively readable as it is hard to classify. Whether it is considering The Nutcracker, baby bunnies as EMTs, the Talking Heads, or childrearing, the sound it returns when touched is distinctly its own.