"Note Book" by Jeff Nunokawa (Princeton University Press, $29.95)

Review by Janine Oshiro
Special to the Star-Advertiser

I’m always on the verge of quitting Facebook. I don’t post enough to feel like a valuable contributor to a virtual community, but I browse enough to feel a little guilty. A collection of his Facebook posts by Jeff Nunokawa, a professor of English literature at Princeton who grew up in Hawaii, might, I hoped, convince me once and for all to stay.

Culled from more than 5,000 essays composed in Facebook’s note function since 2007, "Note Book" elevates the impulse to "Share." The brief essays are initiated by literary quotations from such sources as George Eliot, James Merrill and Gerard Manley Hopkins — along with a sprinkling of popular and personal references: Tina Fey, Joni Mitchell and "The Author’s Mother."

These notes, some accompanied by photos taken in Hawaii, New York City and elsewhere, are also initiated by loneliness, pain and the desire for connection: "I don’t know how you feel when you first wake up in the morning, but I can tell you how I feel: Sad. Lonely. In the dark." For Nunokawa, the way to ease the loneliness is by making offerings, similar to the ones his grandmother made at her homemade Buddhist shrine. Nunokawa writes: "Now, every morning, the grandson wakes up determined to call someone very far away. … As far as offerings go, instead of rice, he’s got a mess of words and pictures."

Nunokawa’s "offerings" are edifying but inconsistent. Some capture an inquisitive, generous and compassionate mind at work, as Nunokawa grapples with "the brevity of any human engagement with people and poems and points in between." Some are startling in their strange beauty: One begins with a quote from "Moby-Dick" and ends with "the realization that the sea I was afraid would swallow me up was more likely a sign of all the tears that have ever been shed."

Other essays are a bit preachy, repetitive, cryptic or impersonal. Nunokawa keeps insisting on our need to connect, but once we’re connected I’d rather learn more about the first and last time he fell in love, or why he stopped making fun of Robert Frost.

At first, it seemed an intriguing but odd conceit. A good notebook is often enjoyed as a companion to another body of work, so one turns to the notebooks of Frost or Gerard Manley Hopkins, say, to shed some light on the poems or the creator. In Nunokawa’s case, the notebook stands alone.

In the end, however, it works. By freeing selected musings from their former habitat of cute baby photos and Starbucks offers, Nunokawa’s "Note Book" illuminates the possibility of a kinder, more intelligent Facebook and invigorates the essay form. For now, at least, I’m staying.

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Janine Oshiro is the author of "Pier."