Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction

The telephone pole on the white cover of Eula Biss’s Notes from No Man’s Land didn’t strike me as a particularly interesting or resonant image until I read the first essay in this collection, which socked me five pages in like an unanticipated gut punch. Biss begins her book-long meditation on America’s troubled race relations by tracing the simultaneous installation of telephone poles across the nation and the widespread “American invention” of lynching. In one startling swoop, the ubiquitous and utilitarian telephone pole becomes a symbol of the violence whites have visited upon blacks in America. As Biss notes, “It was only coincidence that [telephone poles] became convenient as gallows, because they were tall and straight, with a crossbar, and because they stood in public places.” Biss has a gift for finding meaningful connections between unlikely entities. In making these connections, she transforms the relationship between them as well as our relationship to them. In other words, I’ll never be able to look at a telephone pole in quite the same humdrum way again.

The homely and ubiquitous telephone pole’s unanticipated use as a gallows upon which to hang blacks provides a good metaphor to describe Biss’s method throughout Notes from No Man’s Land. She regularly brings us to a more nuanced understanding of the incredibly complex landscape of race relations through her use of coincidence or accident. Biss uses a story of a woman who gave birth to “twins—one white and one black,” following mistaken embryo implantation, to frame “Relations,” a meditation on how we imagine what it means to be white or black, and how we enact our imaginings, though they may be fears and projections rather than more reasoned assessments. In “No [End Page 155] Man’s Land,” Biss recalls moving to the racially mixed neighborhood of Rogers Park in Chicago and being told repeatedly that she has moved to a “pioneering neighborhood.” Rather than being delighted by or proud of the designation, Biss comes to see the word “pioneer” as ominous, for it “betrays a disturbing willingness to repeat the worst mistake of the pioneers of the American West—the mistake of considering an inhabited place uninhabited.” For Biss, an offhand remark or a medical mix-up can open an avenue to challenging the conventional wisdom about race, the generalizations and easy divisions that flatten race as we actually experience it in Brooklyn or in Chicago, walking alongside a mixed-race cousin in Fort Greene or riding a bicycle alone in Rogers Park. As the context shifts (and the context is always shifting), so do the multiple meanings assigned to our skin.

I’m worried that my review of this book, in trying to provide an overview, will inadvertently mischaracterize Notes from No Man’s Land as a primer for politically correct behavior or a litany of white guilt. Neither would be accurate, though Biss’s book, unlike many literary essays, does make overt political statements and tries to provoke the reader to take up positions with which s/he might not feel comfortable. Take as an example “Is This Kansas,” in which Biss filters her experience of living in Iowa City while attending graduate school through logic and standards ordinarily applied to racial Others: “I would often wonder, during my time in that town, why, of all the subcultures in the United States that are feared and hated, of all the subcultures that are singled out as morally reprehensible or un-American or criminal, student culture is so pardoned.” Biss then describes in detail the kind of havoc that college students wreak, from date rape to late-night drinking binges. Unfailingly, at the end of each semester, she writes, “an alarming pile of couches appeared on the corner of Iowa and Summit. There were ten or fifteen couches in the pile, and it was nearly twenty feet tall.” Her description goes on in poignant and amusing detail, but standing alongside Biss’s ability to capture the salient detail is...