John D’Agata, it must be said, is a talented, insightful, erudite writer. He’s gifted with language; he has a subtle, wry sense of humor; his scope ranges from the minute to the encyclopedic; he has no fear of breaking rules. He’s also too clever by half.

Halls of Fame, his recent book of essays, provides ample demonstrations of all these qualities, as D’Agata stretches the boundaries of the essay format, to and occasionally past the breaking point. The author’s bio announces that "he holds MFAs in both nonfiction and poetry," and in his acknowledgments he thanks his alma mater (the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop) for allowing him "to explore the terrain between poems and essays." This exploration carries on in the seven pieces in his book, which are arranged symmetrically, the first and last entries being the most traditional, and the long central piece, "Hall of Fame: An Essay About the Ways in Which We Matter," verging on Gertrude Stein-esque incomprehensibility.

Which is something of a shame, because when he’s not going out of his way to confound the reader, D’Agata writes some dazzling prose. By far the best pieces in Halls of Fame – the most accessible, and the most engaging – are the first and last. "Round Trip," which gets us started, uses a bus tour to Hoover Dam as an entry point into the larger themes of time and recurring cycles, as well as drawing the reader into D’Agata’s apparent fascination with ‘wonders,’ and the codified lists of wonders (such as the "Seven Wonders of the Modern World," of which the Hoover Dam is one) that seem to crop up everywhere. (This fascination is woven throughout Halls of Fame, with alphabetical lists of book titles culled from the Library of Congress catalogue, all beginning with The Wonders of…, appearing between the essays. For example: "The Wonders of the Abacus; The Wonders of Accounting; The Wonders of Acoustics…" and so on.) The final piece in the collection, "And There Was Evening and There Was Morning," is set in Las Vegas and is an extended musing on light and our cultural obsession with it (and, of course, with darkness, for light necessarily implies its opposite). That essay culminates at the Luxor Hotel and Casino, the gigantic black glass pyramid which promotes itself as "The Next Wonder of the World," and from whose apex shines the brightest light on earth. Thus we begin and end in the Nevada desert, in the presence of a Wonder. If all of Halls of Fame were as carefully constructed as these two pieces, I’d use the term ‘wondrous’ to describe the entire book.

Not that there isn’t much that’s worthy in his more challenging material. The second essay, "Martha Graham, Audio Description Of," takes on the task of communicating a visual and physical art form through a verbal medium, and impressively mimics its subject, so that reading it becomes as dizzying and frustrating and evocative an experience as trying to understand Graham’s genius. "Collage History of Art, by Henry Darger," the penultimate piece, is itself a collage of history, images, ideas and words. One of D’Agata’s strengths is in how he marries subject to style, twisting and subverting the essay form to make it best express whatever topic he chooses. Thus "Round Trip," concerned with cycles, features cyclical sentences and paragraphs; thus "And There Was Evening…" has a seven-part structure that, when plotted out, resembles a pyramid. Yet D’Agata gets seduced by his own cleverness, overplaying his hand, so that when his central essay takes up the issue of incoherence, it becomes incoherent itself; similarly, an essay about hyper-intelligent young men in love with their own intelligence (essay number five: "Notes toward the making of a whole human being…") is, itself, over-achieving to the point of being precious.