To Articulate that Confusion: On Brad Listi's "Be Brief and Tell Them Everything"

Brad Listi | Be Brief and Tell Them Everything | Ig Publishing | 2022 | 216 Pages

Brad Listi’s novel about a guy named Brad Listi writing a novel opens with a confession: “This book took twelve years to write.” Listi recounts the many forms his book has taken—novel, “another, different novel,” memoir, essay collection—before closing its initial paragraph in surrender: “now it’s whatever this is.” What exactly “this is” proves elusive. Be Brief and Tell Them Everything defies easy summation. It’s about Brad Listi’s wife’s five miscarriages, his son’s disabilities, the untimely deaths of close friends. It’s about the climate crisis, and psychedelics, and how to navigate late-capitalist America. Listi covers a lot of ground—he seemingly does get to everything. But everything, importantly, comes second. First and foremost, Listi is brief. His book is succinct, both in its total length—just a shade over 200 pages—and in its snapshot-construction. Sentences are short, space breaks aplenty. There’s an appropriately disjointed feel. That construction—the brief—must precede the openness—the everything. Be Brief and Tell Them Everything has to be brief in order to tell everything because life isn’t a steady climb toward narrative coherence. It’s a mess of moments and triumphs and grief and sadness and ecstasy and confusion. That’s the big one—it’s mostly confusion. “So what are you called to do?” Brad’s wife asks him midway through the novel. He responds with the book’s de facto credo: “I’m called to articulate my confusion.” A lot of Listi’s confusion, perhaps predictably, circles back to what the hell he should even write.

Listi isn’t breaking new ground. Contemporary literature is saturated with semi-autobiographical accounts of writers struggling to write. Such works are often considered “autofiction” which, broadly speaking, is a category Be Brief and Tell Them Everything belongs to. Autofiction has a lot in common with historic genres like the Bildungsroman (Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) or the Roman à Clef (The Sun Also Rises), but its contemporary definition is famously, or maybe infamously, hard to pin down given the breadth of books associated with the genre. There’s Sheila Heti’s highly stylized How Should a Person Be?, which features snippets of actual conversations Heti recorded with friends (the book is subtitled A Novel From Life). There’s Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series, which is essentially a collection of memoirs. And there is Ben Lerner’s second novel, 10:04, a thinly veiled work of autobiographical metafiction in which the novel’s creation features prominently within the novel. Listi’s work probably has the most in common with 10:04, as it deploys a similar kind of meta structure—Be Brief and Tell Them Everything is about a guy named Brad Listi writing Be Brief and Tell Them Everything by Brad Listi. It’s a bit confusing, but there’s a kind of all-encompassing self-awareness. And that’s great. Perhaps even admirable. But at the end of the day, this is another white guy writing about himself, changing a few names, and calling it fiction. A lot of autobiographical fiction—Ben Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, comes to mind—seemingly exists in order to vindicate a writer’s life choices. 

I don’t mean to throw shade on such fiction, or on Lerner in particular—in fact, I count myself a huge fan—but in reading his debut I can’t help but imagine an early-20s Lerner wandering around Madrid, trying to get into trouble, seeing everything as fodder for his novel. This doesn’t discount Lerner’s work, but points to the fact that his success probably says more about talent and effort than it does about the uniqueness of his experiences abroad. Now, full disclosure, I am absolutely projecting. Last fall, I (25, white, MFA applications in progress) quit my job and booked a one-way ticket to Europe. I stayed in hostels and fell in love with Danish women and ate croquettes and fell in love with Danish women. I was a satire of myself, and it was fun. I think. It’s hard to be certain—I was too caught up in carefully analyzing the literary potential of each and every moment as I lived it. My experiences didn’t belong to me, but rather to a yet-to-be-named (Mike?) narrator of a forthcoming work of “fiction.” 

Be Brief and Tell Them Everything is different. Listi was never gallivanting around the globe, trying to live a life worthy of literature. He was at home, raising a family, trying to write about anything other than himself. Be Brief doesn’t read like a lot of contemporary autofiction in that it doesn’t read like the book Listi even wanted to write—it reads like the book Listi had to write. Listi did have books he wanted to write, and he walks us through a few of his failed attempts. There was Happiness is Chemical, a screwball comedy about a self-loathing high school chemistry teacher whose dog is dying of cancer. There was The Kidney Book, where a man travels to Israel in order to sell his kidney and free himself from credit card debt. Then there was Man of Letters, an absurd comedy about a world in which spoken word poetry is more popular than the NBA. We could go into more detail here—I was especially taken by the Man of Letters premise—but, ultimately, the specifics aren’t important. What is important is that none of it was specific to Brad Listi. 

Listi is perhaps best known in the literary community for his podcast Otherppl with Brad Listi, a staple of many a recently-published novelist’s press junket. The podcast features prominently in Be Brief, as Listi quotes from real-life interviews he’s conducted with writers like Jonathan Evison, Lynne Tillman, and Tim O’Brien. The O’Brien interview is especially illuminating: “As [O’Brien] was talking,” says Listi, “I found myself thinking, of all things, about this book.” O’Brien, a “decorated combat vet” and canonical American novelist, was recounting navigating landmines in the jungle, “afraid that every step could spell his doom,” and Listi was caught up on his “stupid little champagne problems.”

Listi has a point—it’s ridiculous to compare a creative struggle to the experience of armed combat. (Listi’s lack of focus on O’Brien, whose story collection The Things They Carried might be the most famous work of metafiction ever written, will certainly rub some readers the wrong way.) But the things Listi modestly refers to as “champagne problems” are really life-altering obstacles that emerged from catastrophe. Every time Listi would begin writing on a regular schedule, “boom, something else would happen: another miscarriage, another untimely death, another diagnosis.” In Listi’s attempt to separate himself from the pack of self-satisfied novelists that consider every beer they drank in Paris a literary event, he obscures the fact that, to put it bluntly, he’s really been through some shit. This is a novel about its own creation, and its creation being upended time and time again by tragedy, and the resulting grief. Be Brief, then, may be read as the culmination of that grief—primarily for the people and things Listi lost along the way, but also for the writing projects that were derailed. Listi was ready to tell his own story after endless calamity continually prevented him from writing any other story. “I think sometimes writers have books like this in their life, where there’s just stuff that you cannot avoid,” said Listi in a recent interview. “I would’ve loved to have written something so far afield from all this. But every time I sat down, it was just kind of staring at me.” So he gave up. He surrendered. And he told us about himself.

The work of a lot of this review has been to define Listi’s position within the context of autofiction, and to explore how he’s subverted certain conventions of the genre, to my mind “earning” the autobiographical elements of his novel. Maybe you agree with this assessment, maybe you don’t. Be Brief and Tell Them Everything isn’t for everyone, and there are certainly writers who have overcome far worse and produced great works. But that’s neither here nor there. As any therapist will tell you, suffering isn’t a competition. Besides, separate from where Be Brief fits into the lineage of autofiction (or metafiction), it does seem important to not skip over the simple fact that Listi is an exceptional writer. His prose is sparse, cutting, and honest. There’s a genuine quality to his writing that seems only attainable with age, once you’ve had a couple kids and the prospect of “being cool” has receded safely into the distance. “Maybe my junk is messed up. Maybe there’s something wrong with my dick,” says Listi of his and his wife’s issues conceiving a child. He continues:

Most men’s sperm are misshapen these days… Chemical pesticides. Plastic containers in the microwave. The memory foam in your college mattress. The entire world, ready to poison you. Or maybe it was purely the egg. Maybe the egg was to blame. Maybe it was Franny’s machinery and not mine. I guess I prefer to think of it as some combination, which of course it ultimately was. And anyway, we’ll never know for sure. And even if we could know, which probably we can, we wouldn’t want to know. Because what good would it do, other than lay one of us to waste?

This is Listi at his best. While a lot of autobiographical fiction starts and ends with the self, Listi’s scope goes beyond his own life to seamlessly blend the personal with the universal, leaning into the world’s unavoidable ambiguity. Sometimes one simply has to embrace the uncertainty, find solace in the confusion. Listi’s calling is to articulate that confusion.