An autobiographical book centering on childhood must meet one of two criteria: It has to be by someone famous and important or it has to be very good.
As pretentious as an autobiography is, one limited to childhood years is even more so. And if we don`t care about the author, we have to be made to care through superior writing.
In ”An American Childhood,” Annie Dillard strives to be very good. More often than not, she succeeds, though the book does have several stretches of tedium, some of them lengthy.
The book has recently been released unabridged by Recorded Books (9 1/2 hours, $49.95 purchase, $16.50 rental). The reader is Alexandra O`Karma.
Dillard, born in 1945, writes about her upper-class youth in Pittsburgh in the 1950s. What she conveys is a consciousness about becoming conscious of the world around her.
She notes: ”A child is asleep. Her private life unwinds inside her skin and skull; only as she sheds childhood, first one decade and then another, can she locate the actual, historical stream and see the setting of her dreaming private life-the nation, the city, the neighborhood, the house where the family lives-as an actual project under way.”
Dillard`s tale is largely, though not exclusively, one of interior life. Although she includes wonderful stories about her parents and grandparents, she concentrates on her own intellectual development. She tells of her reading, her drawing, and even, in an excruciatingly dull section, her rock collection and the fantasies it engendered.
But there is a strong plus side. For example, her discussions of her love of playing baseball and her discovery of boys are real gems. She also presents a brilliant, almost anthropological, examination of privileged Presbyterian Pittsburgh society.
”Every woman stayed alone in her house in those days, like a coin in a safe,” she writes.
Her angst at ages 15 and 16, however, gets to be a bit much. ”I whirled through the air like a bull-roarer spun by a lunatic who`d found his rhythm. The pressure almost split my skin.”
O`Karma reads ”An American Childhood” in a breathy, expressive voice that for the first few hours seemed a perfect mirror of the material. Her slow pacing, however, becomes tiresome as Dillard`s work reaches its greatest depths of self-indulgence.
