During a recent concert in Verona, Italy, Adele interrupted her set to tell a concertgoer who was filming the show, "can you stop filming me with a video camera? Because I’m really here in real life, you can enjoy it in real life, rather than through your camera." According to ABC News, "the crowd swiftly applauded the singer’s request." Why? Were they put off by the photographer’s inability to enjoy the concert without recording it? Was it the tripod? Do most of us, usually, behave any better at a child’s piano recital or karate belt test? How much do we let our own phones take us away from real life?
These are the questions of a guilty conscience. In his most recent book, Keep It Fake: Inventing an Authentic Life, Eric G. Wilson, asks another, even thornier question: what does Adele mean by "real life?" She began singing at four, and claims to have spent so much time singing since then that the last book she read was Roald Dahl’s Matilda when she was six. She’s never not been a singer. So, the real life Adele is up there on stage singing, right? Right?
Wilson has his doubts, though they’re metaphysical rather than musical. He begins the book by telling his own origin story: a gifted football player throughout high school, Wilson earned admission to West Point to play quarterback for the Black Knights. This achievement was the culmination of a journey that began with his very first word: ball. He was a kid who got a new quarterback jersey every year for Christmas, collected Topps trading cards, and lay in bed every night throwing the ball up towards the ceiling, "each time imagining I am Fran [Tarkenton], and each toss and catch, a touchdown."
When he got to West Point, however, Wilson realized, "There was no way I really blurted that word. Surely [his father, a high school football] coach wanted so much for my first word to be ‘ball’ that he translated my blubbery random b’s and l’s into his favorite sound. Doing so, with my agreeable mom cheering on, he thrust me into a narrative, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, satisfying to his soul: ‘My boy was born to the gridiron.’" The real life Eric G. Wilson, in other words, was manufactured by someone else, to fulfill someone else’s fantasy. The jerseys, the trading cards, the touchdown dreams—much of his childhood, of his identity, was a carefully scripted drama that his father, not he, had penned.
How to create an authentic self, to weave a cogent, credible "I," to "seize the pen for yourself, form your own plot, grow into your heart’s hero" amidst the myriad influences and forces that would like to appropriate you is the rather monumental question Wilson seeks to answer. That he tries to answer it in 50 chapters barely exceeding 200 pages might seem quixotic, but Wilson has in fact written a terrific account of his own attempts to define, understand, and live an authentic life.
Wilson, as he readily appreciates, is not the first to make such an attempt, and so his book moves quickly, sometimes frenetically, across the work of dozens, perhaps hundreds of poets, musicians, philosophers, and thinkers, all of whom have sought to understand the relationship between substance and self. Each short chapter stands as a miniature essay in the Montaignian sense: an idiosyncratic attempt to explore one facet of an endlessly complex question. A typical chapter contrasts Plato with Michael Pollan before channeling St. Paul’s letter to the Romans through the lens of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, Marshall McLuhan’s "the media is the message," and Friedrich Nietzsche’s (temporary, alas) salvation by typewriter. Such ranging across high, middle, and lowbrow culture can be fraught—a writer can easily slip into a kind of know-it-all dilettantism—and Wilson occasionally shows off his erudition in ways too hip by half.
Still, the book is actually, if not quite intentionally, a brilliant defense of liberal education. Like the best teachers, he asks questions that are immediately interesting and personal. Moreover, they’re high-stakes questions, ones that young people ought to try to answer before they commit themselves to a career or a vocation or a profession. The book exists as Wilson’s attempt to answer these questions for himself, yet he knows, as the best teachers always do, that such answers are temporary and provisional.
The book is also provocative in the best sense of the word: it inspires, prods, and sends you back to better books—Great Books, even—as well as dozens of merely quite excellent books: M. H. Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp, Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, and Don DeLillo’s White Noise all came off the shelf and back into my ken while reading Keep It Fake. As Eva Brann has remarked, "Confronted with such works, the teacher does well to recede into equality with the students, to inquire along with them, and yet to be the safekeeper—the tutor—of the enterprise."
Wilson, confronted with such works, does in fact recede, at least to some extent; there’s no need for the early-chapter showboating here. Instead, his pacing through of the book’s central philosophical questions—"What is real?" and "How to create an authentic self?"—gains credibility with every new thinker he encounters. As the chapters progressed, I found myself less and less wanting to argue with Wilson and more and more appreciating his determination to filter his own experiences and questions through the books and thinkers that have asked and answered them best.
So how does Wilson answer the questions he’s so powerfully explored? Agreeing with Wallace Stevens that "The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else," Wilson embraces the position of the "Romantic ironist," "doubting while confirming, improvising as much as planning, composing as does an artist in the midst of his drafting, revising endlessly, keeping what works, casting aside what doesn’t on the lookout for something new to use, or something old to reuse." Even if every story we tell ourselves about ourselves is a fiction, some fictions are better than others: "the more salubrious for the greater number of creatures, the truer; the more destructive, increasing falseness." He concludes that we must, "cut and paste, amalgamate, add, bend, fold, tear at the edges or paste in shellac, or start fresh, create the persona that will hopefully elicit what is most nuanced and charitable and full of grace." If this answer doesn’t entirely convince, one does well to remember that—in books and in life—questions are always more interesting than answers. And, to quote Flaubert, "stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions."
Perhaps Adele, like the rest of us, believes she’s living a real life. Or perhaps she doth protest too much. As someone who has been a celebrity most of her adult life, perhaps she worries that the camera and the amplifier, the microphone and the stage, are what make her real, that her authentic self consists of pixels and light rather than flesh and bone. In either case, she might have, like Wilson, considered what David Foster Wallace wrote in his Kenyon commencement address: "If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options." Whether those options include "aesthetic pragmatism," "Romantic irony," "the new sincerity," or something else, in the era of the curated image and the personal brand, Wilson has taken an important step towards understanding how one might craft a truly authentic "I."