I’ve always found the lives of books tremendously interesting. I refer here to the narrative of how a book is perceived—commercially, intellectually, emotionally—within the passage of time and history. To me, the way a piece of literature is read and discussed is as important as the work itself. I find these “lives” fascinating; the vast majority of literature “dies” and is consigned to archival stacks, but those that live on typically have extremely peculiar stories. Of course, this is part of my lifelong plan to annoy English majors by doing as little literary analysis as humanly possible when analyzing literature.
I am now old enough to start noticing the growth and decline of certain books since I started reading sometime in 2000. For example, I recently happened across a Penguin Classics omnibus copy of His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. As with anyone who was deeply immersed in YA literature of the early 2000s, the His Dark Materials trilogy firmly stood in the “teens” section of Borders, clad in an enticingly morose dust jacket by bookstores looking to cash in on Harry Potter-esque fantasies. It even went through the cycle of an embarrassingly bad cash-in kids’ film adaptation that is thoroughly disdained (hello, Eragon). Yet now, His Dark Materials is Literature, complete with a scholarly introduction and type that is the same size as Milton’s Paradise Lost, its great inspiration. Who decided this? Why do I and so many others automatically conflate the giant Middlemarch paperback with no illustrations to be Literature and the Stephen King book with a weird cover to be Something Else?
Anyway, this has all a long segue into a frank analysis of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, a nonfiction novel about the 1996 Mount Everest disaster. I make a point to read Into Thin Air once a year, mostly because I can knock out the book in about a day. While it’s very compelling, I never really thought it was going to be a “classic”, but it appears that it is slowly entering the accursed American educational curriculum as a book for high schoolers to answer meaningless response questions.
By no means do I want to slag off our beloved high school English teachers, who do the best they can with extremely limited resources. I’m pointing fingers at a much easier target, the people who invent these “age-friendly” curricula, and then get local governments to shell out cash for their shoddy work. Take this listing for a 386-page Into Thin Air high school course from Prestwick Press, which advertises these topics that high schoolers must “learn”.
Obviously, this section harkens back to soporific lesson plans for The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye that abrogate the entire reason for reading in the first place. I’m sure Prestwick Press tried very hard to create this lesson plan, but pigeonholing one of the most complicated nonfiction enterprises/mountaineering tragedies of the last 30 years into “here’s what irony means” is astonishing to me. I just think it severely detracts from the reading experience.
Into Thin Air is much, much more than that. Regardless of what you think about Krakauer’s very 90s self-indulgent writing style (I happen to like it, I understand why you might hate it), let’s be real: the fact that the 1996 Everest disaster happened and that one of the most acclaimed nonfiction writers was there and played a central role in the plot is freakin’ crazy. Keep in mind that Krakauer had already written and published his other 90s nonfiction classic, Into the Wild, before he ever went on the trip. This creates one of those very, very rare events in literature, a great narrative writer who ends up participating in a historical event as a critical actor.
I don’t think the Prestwick Press curriculum illustrates how insane this is. There are many great writers who engage with historical events in real-time—Hannah Arendt at the Eichmann Trial, James Baldwin’s No Name in the Street, Gabriel García Marquéz’s News of a Kidnapping—but none of these writers were involved in the events. The exceptions to this case are very few and far between. Even when artists end up becoming celebrities and their actions become famous, it tends to be retroactive—James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway did not receive live news coverage of their lives before they wrote things down.
The rare exceptions where someone is a key player and capable of writing their thoughts down in engaging prose are way more unlikely than you think. Sure, you get endless memoirs and autobiographies from the John Boltons of the world or first-person accounts from Winston Churchill, Barack Obama, etc. But these are, frankly, more likely to be propaganda than analyzable Literature, and ultimately 99% of those are about as useful as those awful memoirs pro athletes have ghostwritten and placed in the Sports Section. They’re entertaining, but not exactly “meaningful”.
As for the other criterion, the 1996 Mount Everest disaster was certainly big news at the time. It led Section A, Page 1 of the New York Times and made the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald. There were articles in all the major magazines. There’s a Hollywood movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal. It might be the only thing the general public writ large knows about mountaineering, even as avid mountain enthusiasts (myself included) point out that other mountains like K2, Annapurna, and Kangchenjunga have proven more deadly.
So, in the “meaningful and high-quality while author plays a critical role” bucket, we have…Isabel Allende (sorta), Leon Trotsky, that time Victor Hugo led a revolt against Louis-Napoleon’s coup, Thucydides, Julius Caesar’s commentaries (only classic because they survived while others did not?)…yeah really not that much. Thus, even if Krakauer’s nonfiction writing is a small notch below Baldwin, Arendt, or Marquéz, something that Krakauer would probably concede, Into Thin Air is interesting because of its existence alone.
In a further attempt to anger English majors worldwide, I’m not really going to provide much “literary analysis” for Into Thin Air myself. Instead, I’m going shamelessly riff on one of Krakauer’s favorite moves and subject readers to an incredibly self-indulgent discussion about a modest hike up a Fourteener that I did in Colorado and its relationship to how I view the story’s place in the literary world.
While scrambling up the final ascent of Mount Princeton, hikers will notice a memorial for Catherine Pugin, who was struck by lightning and died at that spot in 1995. I understand the need to mourn the dead, but after hours of grueling rock scrambling and thinning air, seeing this memorial is one of the more depressing reminders of one’s own mortality. It appears about 200 vertical feet below the summit, and even though the danger of dying on this day hike is close to zero, you can’t help but feel utterly helpless.
The stomach-churning feeling of fighting nature and losing is as eye-opening as they say it is. Although the big upshot of Into Thin Air is “you really don’t need to climb Mt. Everest”, I don’t think it’s an indictment of climbing or doing dangerous things in general. In classic transcendentalist fashion, it’s the commercialization and capitalization of Everest that makes the experience awful, not the act itself.
On the heels of that normie opinion, here’s another one: outdoor recreation is actually good. I’m sure some blackpilled Twitter user could argue that being able to take time off and fight against nature is some kind of bourgeois behavior, but at some level, the inherent appreciation for beauty and accomplishment does exist somewhere. There are 327 million visits to National Parks each year for a reason.
One of the better insights into Jon Krakauer as a person is how he didn’t realize he had PTSD until he talked to some Iraq veterans while researching his Pat Tillman book.
This serves as a good insight into the Boomer/Gen X view on mental health treatment.
I hate to be one of those simplistic “toxic white male masculinity only causes destruction for themselves and others” people, but man, if there’s any book that proves it, this is it. Not only is Krakauer tacitly aware of this problem, especially the whiteness, but he also ends up voluntarily contributing to the disaster through these biases (not doing necessary rope work because the Sherpas are supposed to do it, for example).
The chief reason I don’t understand why the book has breached the high school canon is that it is such a tragically flawed narrative. The writing is gripping and intense, but it’s impossible to avoid that this whole thing was a colossal fuckup and Krakauer is completely haunted by survivor’s guilt despite only contributing to, at most, about 10% (a critical 10%, to be fair) of the disaster. I mean, there’s a passage later where one of the dead climbers’ relatives tells Krakauer “you are writing this to sate YOUR EGO” and he just bows his head and takes it. All editions now have the long postscript about the feud he had with one of the expeditions’ guides (Anatoli Boukreev), and it’s just so petty and you can tell it’s just a bunch of people who effectively went through a mass near-death experience and watched half a dozen friends die in one day…it’s barely even a story, at times, it’s just a gut-wrenching tale of the absolute worst day in everyone’s lives. There is no moral lesson. There are no happy endings. It’s a grim realism that just bums you out for weeks. Maybe that’s something high schoolers can learn something from?
It’s also hard to overstate how Final Destination this shit is, even for a bunch of people who routinely risk their lives climbing above 25,000 feet. One of the expedition’s main Sherpa guides died before the book was even published. That feud from point 7 was left unresolved when Boukreev died in an avalanche in 1999. Two other side characters (Mal Duff and Goran Kropp) would die during mountain incidents. That’s not to mention the hundreds of unnamed Sherpa support staff on the 1996 trip, some of whom have certainly died of unnatural causes since publishing. The most recent unfortunate passing that we know of was that of Charlotte Fox, who died in 2018 at 61 after a freak household accident.
I don’t know why I decided to resurrect this newsletter for this article, but it has happened.