Thanks. A lot

Let the critics say what they will about Elizabeth Wurtzel's books -- her acknowledgments pages are sheer literary genius

By Tom Bissell

Mar 19, 2002 | The rise of the acknowledgments page in the world of literature is mirrored by many wider, often unlovely trends elsewhere in the arts. Movies, for instance, once ran their credits upfront, including only the relevant heavy lifters (director, producer, screenwriter), yet we now endure a Talmudically lengthy crawl of names at any film's end. Multimillionaire benefactors shamelessly demand that museum wings bear their names. Authors now habitually close the curtain on their books with acknowledgments of law-review density, a horror to which historians are particularly prone. Colleagues, researchers, editors, even whole libraries, are lined up against a wall of blank white paper and slathered with the balm of Gilead.

All this acknowledgment -- it turns the stomach. The reflexive politesse of the acknowledgments page has, for too long, stifled its potential as an explosive art form of its own. One writer and one writer alone has seen through the transparency of the acknowledgments page and, like Prometheus (or whatever), freed the trapped energy of its possibilities. This is Elizabeth Wurtzel, who in the course of her three works of nonfiction has somehow become indebted to (by rough estimate) 165 people -- not including her cat (one Zap), the Simon & Schuster production department (or "the poor, beleaguered people in Simon and Schuster's production department") and the "the entire hospitality industry" (you know -- them).

But what is really going on? While Wurtzel's books do not resemble one another overmuch, her acknowledgments pages are marked with clear stylistic footprints, are haunted by recurring characters, and circle the same deathless themes; while her books are often difficult reads, the prose too carbonated for long gulps, her acknowledgments pages explode like geysers. However, with the recent publication of "More, Now, Again," it is now evident that in these "acknowledgments" Wurtzel is laying down Tarot of dazzling trickery.

Read one after another after another, these pages of ostensible "thanks" quickly accrue a Nabokovian intensity. Here, the putative "author" becomes a Loki of literary dislocation. As satire, Wurtzel's acknowledgments are a Swiftian rebuke of our fin de siècle times. Stylistically, morally and thematically, they will stand as her most coherent and lasting body of work.

The acknowledgments for "Prozac Nation," published in 1994, allowed first entry into Wurtzel's twisting labyrinth. Right off, Wurtzel establishes the tone that her books proper employ as mere prelude. "Without Betsy Lerner," she writes, "this book quite simply would not have been possible." It is obvious that "Betsy Lerner" is, in a fascinating reversal, Kinbote to Wurtzel's living Shade. But wait. "This project ["Prozac Nation"] began, and assumed various other guises, back in 1986; over the years, many have tried and none has succeeded -- a couple even lost their jobs in the process -- to extract a manuscript from me."

Notice the cunning with which Wurtzel deviously establishes that 1) she has been a serious writer for a very, very long time, 2) has been editorially pursued for nearly as long, and 3) has personally cost men and women their livelihood. The pool of mysteries deepens.

But we are not yet done with Betsy Lerner. She is, Wurtzel reports, "the best book editor on earth." But also "a great friend." But then "the big sister I never had." She is additionally "Job's most likely successor in the patience department" and "the coolest thirtysomething I've ever met."

It may disappoint that Wurtzel allows this panegyric to the fictional Lerner to rest on such an anticlimax. Why only the coolest thirtysomething she's ever met? Why not the coolest thirtysomething in the whole galaxy? But Wurtzel is playing with readerly expectation, drawing us deeper into her atmosphere of invented gratitude.

Wurtzel follows with thanks to her "agent," the Ariel-like "Lydia Wills," whose apparent earthbound sainthood is suggested most by her "willingness to take my hysterical phone calls at all hours." The reader is thus lured away from Wills and toward "Wurtzel," by now a vital and fully fictionalized self.

Following the Wills interlude is a meteor shower of gorgeously appreciative deceit. "Ken Carpenter" is thanked for being "a marketing genius" and, in an aside that conjures up plenty of kinky loft-based rumpy-pumpy, lauded for being "the only New Yorker I know who has a camouflage-print video camera." The photographer "Marion Ettlinger" is thanked for making "the girl in the author photo look like someone I'd actually want to be." (Ettlinger is also crowned "the coolest fortysomething on earth," which would, if Wurtzel's "acknowledgments" were real, doubtlessly explain why Ettlinger never photographed Wurtzel again.)

The many, many friends of Wurtzel are thanked because, after all, "if your life is going to be one long emergency, it's a good idea to have good friends." (Montaigne? No. Wurtzel.) And what friends! "Jason Bagdade" -- "my favorite boy on earth" -- has proved (with Wurtzel, of course) that the maxim "that men and women simply can't just be friends" is just plain untrue -- a delirious sendup of the banal commonplaces that too often disfigure straight acknowledgments pages.

But sadness lurks here, too, evoked with a limpid gentleness one rarely finds in Wurtzel's more conventional work. One can touch her life, it seems, and come away not with roses but a thorn. A gentleman named "Nathan Nichols," we learn, "deserved more and better" from Wurtzel.

After one has snow-shoed about three-quarters of the way through this blizzard, we find that Wurtzel fears that some people "don't even know that I feel the gratitude I do because, sadly, I sometimes have a strange way of showing it." ("I was the shadow of a waxwing slain," indeed!)

It seems that, in "Prozac Nation," Wurtzel had only glimpsed the possibilities of the fictional universe she big-banged while "thanking" people. The 1998 publication of acknowledgments pages for "Bitch" saw an imaginative expansion, a Great Leap Forward, not unlike that which Faulkner enjoyed from "Mosquitoes" to "The Sound and the Fury." Like the annotation in "Pale Fire," the back-end acknowledgments in "Bitch" explain and elucidate all that comes before.

"When life becomes unstrung," Wurtzel explains near the beginning, "at a time when you are working on something you care about more than anything else on earth -- which is to say, in my case, this book" -- but it matters not what follows. The joke's trap has been loaded, and it awaits its guileless snitch. Anyone who has read "Bitch" cannot possibly imagine Wurtzel cared one bit about the thing while writing it.

The most pressing moral concern of "Prozac Nation" -- determining decade-specific exemplars of coolness -- resurfaces here ("Aunt Zena" and "Uncle Bill" are knighted "the coolest eightysomethings I know of"), as does the diabolical "Wurtzel" mask: "I ended up befriending my downstairs neighbor ... As soon as I discovered that she had both a VCR and a cat to play with, I knew she was worth cultivating." The verifiably real but here fictionalized photographer "David Vance" is thanked by Wurtzel for taking her photo and, in a trope device similar to the use of "Marion Ettlinger" in "Prozac Nation," the author's vain literary doppelgängtrix fears "I will only disappoint anyone who sees your pictures before they meet me."

Next Page: The apotheosis of genius, and its eclipse

• View blog reactions