Collections of Nothing

Amazon Best of the Month, December 2008: One of the oddest memoirs of the year may well be the best. William Davies King is a theater professor who over his fifty-plus years has gathered, in countless binders and boxes, a vast collection of things nobody else wants: cat-food labels, chain letters, skeleton keys, cereal boxes, chopstick wrappers, the "Place Stamp Here" squares from the corners of envelopes. It's an obsession you might think was inexplicable--least of all by the one obsessed--but in Collections of Nothing King makes his mania seem nearly rational, and the personal drama of it wryly fascinating. (Imagine if Henry Darger had written witty, self-aware essays that analyzed his obsessions without puncturing their mystery.) King is an academic and he's been through therapy, but he writes free of the clots and cliches of both of those disciplines, contemplating what he calls "the cumbersummation of me" with the myopic elegance of Nicholson Baker and a moving understanding that this strange, apparently worthless collection--and now this lovely and wise book about it--are what he has to offer the world. --Tom Nissley