Stephanie G’Schwind on the BAE 2009, edited by Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver introduces the 2009 volume, not surprisingly, by talking about what an essay is. She turns to Emerson, her favorite essayist, noting that his writings “do not thoroughly answer the questions so many of us ask, but often enough such questions cannot be reasoned out entirely.” I like that. An essay doesn’t have to answer the question it asks. Maybe it doesn’t even ask a question. (I usually find essays that don’t have answers are the most interesting.) Some of the essays Oliver has selected provide possible answers; some don’t, happy to embrace beautiful, heartbreaking uncertainty. Oliver also imagines the essay as “a party to which all subjects are invited: humor, pathos remembrance, declaration, emotions, religious belief, the natural world.” The essays collected here reflect such a party, a rich gathering of subjects and writers, questions raised, questions considered.

Among the many standouts for me:

Speaking directly from and to 2009—when we were reeling from the housing crisis and attending economic meltdown—Michael Lewis’s “The Mansion: A Subprime Parable” is a delight. Lewis invites us into the obscenely enormous mansion he and his family rented in New Orleans for a few months: “The living room wasn’t a kind of ballroom: it was a ballroom, with $80,000 worth of gold on the ceiling. The bedrooms were the size of giant living rooms. The changing rooms and closets and bathrooms were the size of bedrooms.” It’s a site of unapologetic excess and gives him the perfect setting in which to ponder the origins of the housing crisis. A likely contributing factor, though surely not THE answer: “Americans feel a deep urge to live in houses that are bigger than they can afford.” And we watch as the Lewis family experiments with satisfying that urge, ultimately to be expelled from the house after a series of strange mishaps (and the finite contours of Lewis’s checkbook). It’s a terrific read, especially for those of us who’ve always wondered just what’s inside the mansions of the ultra-wealthy.

I especially admire Janna Malamud Smith’s “Shipwrecked” for its demonstration of literature’s power to provide metaphor for, give shape to, and thus bear us through difficult experiences. Smith writes of suddenly, unexpectedly recalling Robinson Crusoe in the aftermath of her mother’s death: the feeling of being shipwrecked, abandoned, of plundering the remaining possessions as she must contend with clearing out her mother’s apartment. In her introduction, Oliver writes: “[Essays] are like letters from a stranger that you cannot bear to throw away. They haunt you; they strengthen you.” Which resonates with me as I now borrow Smith’s Crusoe metaphor, some twenty-five years after my father’s death, still dreaming the recurring dream in which my father has not in fact died, but has nonetheless discovered his house empty, as I have plundered and disposed of everything, spent the inheritance. I am truly both haunted and strengthened by this essay.

I’m also very fond of Jerald Walker’s “The Mechanics of Being,” which I included in an anthology I edited and published in 2014, Man in the Moon: Essays on Fathers and Fatherhood. In this essay, Walker tells the story of his father’s blindness, brought on by a childhood injury; his parents’ marriage, separation, and reconciliation; and his frustration with trying to write a novel about his father, realizing that he had missed the essence of his father’s “core and sum of . . . existence.” Here, I think, is an example of what Oliver is talking about when she says that an essay can offer “soul-felt truth”—received while listening to his father’s eulogy—“from the individual perspective of someone deft in the craft of expression,” which Walker clearly is. 

And I particularly love Gregory Orr’s “Return to Haynesville.” So much is packed into the very first paragraph, just eight sentences long: when and where he was born; the defining tragedy of his childhood—of his life—in which he accidentally killed his younger brother, an event he identifies as his life’s beginning; and the event he identifies as his life’s possible ending, being kidnapped by vigilantes in 1965. Now, I am an editor and thus strive to be a patient reader. I practice yoga to, among other reasons, become even more patient. But I confess that I adore a paragraph like this, one that requires no patience, that wastes no time and is nearly a complete story in itself. How can you not want to keep reading? I am immediately ravenous for this essay.

Orr takes us to 1965, when he is eighteen, and the circumstances that lead him to the Deep South to work in the civil rights movement, amid the recent and gruesome murders of fellow rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner. Following a section break, we realize we’re in a story within a story: Orr is now forty years older and taking a trip, with two companions, back to Haynesville, Alabama, to the site of his kidnapping, to the “tiny town that has been so long lodged like a sliver in [his] memory.” He tells his passengers how he and several other rights workers were detained and tortured for several days, before he was released and then subsequently kidnapped by two plain-clothed, gun-wielding men who threaten to kill him but instead take him to the Haynesville jail, where he is kept, without charge, for eight days, then finally released, thoroughly traumatized. As he tells the story—becoming “so caught up . . . that I’ll lose all sense of my companions and of time and distance passing”—he realizes that soon his narrative and the actual place are going to intersect, “as though the story and the highway were a single, fused flowing.” Oliver seems to have this essay in mind when she writes, “The essay is full of personal discoveries, experiences, disclosures, a revelation of the ‘examined’ self.” Having returned to the site of his trauma and discovered that it has no longer has power over him, he is overcome: “a single word comes to me: joy.” Here is the revelation: “Joy is my body’s primal response to the enormity of the gift it has been given—a whole life! A whole life was there waiting for me the day I left this town.” This essay will stay with, haunt, and intrigue me for a very long time.




Stephanie G’Schwind is the editor-in-chief and nonfiction editor of Colorado Review, as well as the director of the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University. She is also the editor of Man in the Moon: Essays on Fathers and Fatherhood (CLP, 2014).

Thomas Larson on BAE 1995: Man Versus Boy

The surprise? That I single out the male authors. That I count twenty authors total, thirteen men. That my distaste is palpable. Find them sexist, show-off-y, self-infatuated. Was unprepared for such a response. In me. What the passage of twenty years since I first read these pieces can do. It’s the self-righteousness that’s so bothersome. The wooliness of having put it behind me or I have no doubts so no reflection turns the bearing as though the past were father to the man. How glossily several calibrate their inner Brett Easton Ellis in whom the boy demands—be he PFC, rookie, deckhand, red-shirt—to ring the remembrance.

What I mean is. John Turturro in Barton Fink. Michael Keaton in Birdman. The boy in the man who is ever what he was. Who LP’s Sticky Fingers or Blonde on Blonde with unclogged reverence. Boys in men other men admire. Who reel highlights, who wash-and-wield a Buick 6, who used to be, if not are, some woman’s used-to-be. Those literary varietals—the stooge incarnate or the male ingénue. Whose sense of self comes at the boy’s behest.

Such is the evidence of several macho-laced essays from 1995—and, lest we forget, twas an aggressively transformative year: daily email began, the dotcoms roared, and word processors generated our texts. One of the blowhard writers is Edward Hoagland. In his “Strange Perfume,” we get an over-shared, over-analytic defense of his lifelong infidelity with wives and tricks and student girlfriends (Are you so hard up, Mr. H., that you have to date your students?), a sort of brag-fact about the women he chose (who all look alike: willowy, irresistible), a boorish tell-some: “Men have a sack of seeks to sow, and such a theory does not contradict the adolescent aspects of cheating on our wives, because nature did not construct men with the expectation that they were going to live very long.” Think on that they: men, women, or both? I don’t believe it’s ironical, either: I know a sixty-five-year-old, who, after he read about new research into male sexual/predator behavior (by no means an accepted staple of human evolutionary psychology, just another theory), said to me, “How else do you explain attractive women? They made themselves attractive so we’d be more likely to fuck them!” How, as Simone de Beauvoir said, men mystify women with allure to turn them into lesser others.

Like Hoagland is the glacially self-absorbed Joel Agee, castoff son of the great immersion journalist James (all praise that famous man). In “Eros at Sea,” a paean to his shipping-out days, he’s trying to forget the fifteen-year-old girl who he claims seduced his obsession for her, and their bedded bliss, a summons to write this pouty tale of mock-torment. Because the essay is boarded by a con man to whom Agee gives everything off his back, plus his earnings: only after which, severely chastened, can he toss the girl’s memory out to sea. It’s an essay in which the author promises to wake up to his self-prison—and never does. Rather, he stays in the comfort zone of his literary manliness: the suffering boy, man-enameled, is worth hem-hawing over, as is the slippered foot of Eros. Hemingwayesque, we call such dumb-downed feelings on which we pedestal immaturity, the mind-binding rite of romantic love.

Another prig, the last of a breed, is William H. Gass whose “The Art of Self,” an essay I read first in Harper’s in 1995 and loathed it then and which fire-fueled the backlash against the memoir genre (the form’s growing pains authors have dealt with in their work despite his pique). But, at the time, Gass’s formalist esthetic was territorially unchallenged, incontestable. Read now, the gas of self-loathing escapes from this misanthropic balloon, here and there, fascistic. Writing of industrialization, he says, “machines began to replicate objects, and little people began to multiply faster than wars or famines could reduce their numbers.” “Little people” are, of course, nonliterary. Most of his dyspepsia harangues type: he doesn’t name a single author of autobiography (later, the memoir) he so reviles. He just hates the lot of them. Why? Well, judge for yourself.

Many lives are so empty of interest that their subject must first perform some feat like sailing alone around the world or climbing a hazardous peak in order to elevate himself above mere existence, and then, having created a life, to write about it.

He calls autobiography/memoir a “freak of nature,” a “corruption of form,” a book that is “now [1995?] celebrated” for its “most commonplace and cliché-ridden awareness,” “irrelevant” and “pious.” Compared to what? The factual truth of history? The Confessions of Augustine? Since all writing must be judged against certified masterpieces like Thucydides and Shakespeare, why bother to write anything, spectacular or ordinary, since it’ll never undress Henry James. Such are his mulish assumptions. His claims are nonsensical: that all autobiographers dump in everything and cannot separate data from core (as if, twenty years ago, hundreds of such published iniquities lined the shelves of Borders), that no one but the historically significant should write such work (another male bias, which reserves the form only for those who do), and that no one can practice the kind of selective reduction a good memoir should have (of which Gass cites Lewis Thomas, not a memoirist, but an essayist, as his lone example). As I say, these points have been contravened by the memoir form itself, via nonfiction narrative and criticism, rendering, in retrospect, Gass’s personal tantrum childish.

What’s further bedeviling about Gass’s arrogance is that a) virtually no one supports his literary extremism and b) he couldn’t even imagine the memoirist’s esthetic. He doesn’t understand the primal urge to memoir—that authors make books in which their unknowing, their tentativeness and trials with “telling the truth,” becomes the narrative drama. Had Gass just read Virginia Woolf or Frank Conroy or Vivian Gornick, he might have recognized the opposing viewpoint. But that would mean he would have felt such nonfictional narrative drama as necessary. He didn’t. He pontificated a perch for literature whose authoritarianism no one—who reads well or poorly—trusts anymore.

In the end, it’s his peevishness about form and his masculine disgust with consensus—the memoir was, twenty years ago, a new literary genre, a readymade for the passionate postmodern author, burningly clear to me and millions of others even then—that galls. Fear of literature’s evolutionary maladaptation to millennial changes in technology and the death of the humanities blackened Gass’s cognition, despite/because of his erudition. He’s hyper-allegiant to classic literary forms. It’s a claim that we writers, so severely clubbed by our forebears, in Gass’s view, should know better than to bypass Chaucer’s humor, to forgo Ezra Pound’s dictum that only the French troubadours are worth studying, to think our religious lives must be begin and end with the Bible. Such edifices will crumble—if we let them.

*

Onto an alternative male persona in several essays, men who unmale themselves. Tobias Wolff, in “Civilian,” for instance, who remembers getting back from Vietnam, in a stateside bar with a date when he runs into Dicky, a drunk grunt whom Wolff, a first lieutenant, supervised in country and can’t avoid postwar. The talk falls into war brag, which, as Wolff tells it, he regrets at once, changing his tone as he goes, conscious of his bullshitting: “As soon as you open your mouth,” he writes, “you have problems, problems of recollection, problems of tone, ethical problems.” What’s compelling, though, is that the war story elicits “in the very act of confession, an obscene self-congratulation for the virtue required to see your mistake and own up to it?”

Where does that desire to unpack one’s swagger, such self-assessment, come from? Hard to say other than the individual. Which makes me wonder whether all combat vets don’t feel maniacal guilt, especially those who boast of how they Audie Murphy-ed their way out of danger when they know that the real heroes of that pitched battle, who took the fire and freed them, are dead. Hasn’t this been one of the war author’s recondite strategies all along—from Leo Tolstoy to Anthony Swofford—all too often buried under our civilian choruses of “thanks for your service” or those star-vehicle movies celebrating sniper death over suicidal despair?

And then there’s “Father Stories,” an elegant meditation on a son’s criminality and a father’s guilt: John Edgar Wideman’s essay taken from his memoir, Fatheralong. What takes Wideman time to get right, understandably, is the weightiness of the moment he realizes that his grown son has been accused of a murder. His fear that it’s true is pasted together from stories of his son’s growing-up: one, at summer camp, when the boy was six and keys from the motorized vehicles went missing and were never found. The boy was the never-named prime suspect. Then, other memories: as a child, his son terrified of leaves falling on him from a tree branch and the father’s consoling him; the father’s own fright, when young, of birds, their beastial feathers, vultures he saw in a movie, and his own panicky burial of the fear in himself.

When Wideman hears of his son’s probable guilt in the murder, he addresses him directly, telling him that when he heard the news of the killing and his son’s running away eight years earlier, he collapsed in abject anguish, prayed he’d die of the pain, and, eventually, accepted that time, “like a long string studded and barbed,” would endlessly drag them through the wound. “The years are countless moments, many as intense as this one I’m describing to you, moments I conceal from myself as I’ve hidden them from other people.”

The mature voice, confessing to his son, confessing to us—the principle that for despair to be in the writing, it must be in the writer while he essays. Wideman does not so much recall the past and its inescapable grief, recollected in solitude, but he laments its ongoing occupation in a purgative present. This is the time of a man’s having lost his son to an ever-enlarging universe, in which the son’s guilt, the father’s premonitions, the murdered man’s life, the son’s trial and sentence, the paternal limp all meld in “the wrap of oblivion embedding them.” The father can say all this about and to his son until he feels love and hope equal loathing and oblivion. Such is the rawness of a man’s self-disclosure, an essay so intense that when (some) men read it, they figure they just as well keep their own wounds hidden. And, if they do write about their lives and opinions, they go no deeper than Hoagland, Agee, or Gass.

Twenty years on, and I’m still rereading Harold Brodkey’s memoir-ode, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death, from which BAE 1995 collected a portion, “Dying: An Update.” For me, (an illness writer with acute, not chronic, heart disease), Brodkey’s takedown of his hubris structures the finest trauma tale I know. In it, we hear of his travail with AIDS, his hospital stint, his wife’s caretaking, the daily horrors of his suffocated breathing, of how “my life ended . . . and my dying began.” The humor is deft: to his generously hopeful, pragmatic doctor, Brodkey, already weary of fighting the good fight, barks, “Look, it’s only death. It’s not like losing your hair or all your money. I don’t have to live with this.”

Hyperaware of his motives, Brodkey counts himself among the marketers of American optimism. Our idea of freedom is future-focused—the testing/the pills/the palliative care are deferred compensation. We will be better, healthier, and happier. If we stop complaining. If we follow the doctor’s advice. If we smile more (what can it hurt?). Brodkey avers that even memoir, whose form he is as suspicious of as he is faithful to, is part of the medical hopefulness our culture espouses. To write ourselves to health, Brodkey understands, is another role we adopt—especially as we’re dying. Make your dying memorable!

Brodkey’s genius is to deconstruct the dyer’s strongman persona in himself. While he’s buying this myth, he’s also casting his grumpiness everywhere and analyzing it as he goes. In one part, he kvetches like an old prune: “This goddamn hospital bed is so uncomfortable you might as well kill me and get it over with.” Or he admits he’s a pain-in-the-ass to Ellen, his wife, whose embrace grows tighter the more conflicted he becomes, saying that she wants to have AIDS, too, so she can die with him. Which he calls “a bit of a marital lie,” and then lets her have it: “That’s bullshit, honey. It isn’t what I want. Just can it, O.K.?”

For Brodkey, the maladies are twinned: there is the disease, through which he wades and wets himself—“Everything was suffocation and the sentence of death, the termitelike democracy and chemical gusts of malaise and heat, of twisting fever, and the lazy but busy simmering of the disease in me”—and there is the fashionable context of that disease, its odd social allure. Having AIDS says so much, in addition to its blight, about his elevated position in the bell jar of literary New York: his bi-sexuality, his putative reputation as “The Fuck You Dreamed Of,” his mastery of the mordant “New Yorker” short story. “What a joke,” he says, unconvincingly. “I was never in the Casanova range and league of Norman Mailer.” Still, he wants to make peace with the author in the mirror. Who will and who won’t be cowed.

In the end and home from the hospital, he has no heroic self left to purge: AIDS ate it. No, there’s something keener to unveil—he is not the atoning invalid he thinks he is or his culture wishes he would exemplify: “We called no one. We were still telling the family and anyone else who telephoned that I had pneumonia, nothing more.” So much for negotiating his literary reputation. “In a rather transparent isolation, my arrogant deathliness and her [his wife’s] burning gentleness were dancing together in a New York light in our apartment. It was like childhood, a form of playing house.” And then this admission: “The truths in such domestic and emotional enclosures tend to go unrecorded.” Brodkey’s irony is never menacing. His burden is light.

The degree to which the man is writing about the boy still in the man and the man dethroning the boy’s reign—the male complex, its shadow intact, which this edition’s editor, Jamaica Kincaid, may or may not have realized she had foregrounded in her choices (thanks, for this essay, all the same)—has drawn my scorn and my praise. Was it obvious to me in 1995? Were the genders of the writers—and their unconscious (what do we call it now) genderizing—unavailable to my readerly capacity then? What happened to me that I see it now?

The male confession was just beginning to substantiate. Wolff, Wideman, and Brodkey were the 1990s’ cutting edge. The reason I may not have recognized male disclosure as liberation then (and the opposite, a codpiece exhibitionism) is I didn’t have the experience of my being the experience of my writing. It took twenty years of authoring to see my gender’s potential for intimacy—and its lack—whether in my essays or those of others. How transparent it is to me now. How utterly seen-through.

*

Journalist, critic, and memoirist Thomas Larson is the author of three books: The Sanctuary of Illness: A Memoir of Heart Disease, The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” and The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative. He is a longtime staff writer for the San Diego Reader, now its Critic-At-Large, and Book Reviews editor for River Teeth. Larson teaches in the MFA Program at Ashland University, Ashland, Ohio. His website is www.thomaslarson.com.

BAE 1998 with Brian Doyle: I AM A GOLDEN ESSAY GOD!

What do I remember best from being in Best American Essays for the first time, in 1998?

This:

Back then the back cover of the annual volume listed the contributors in alphabetical order, in lovely crisp 12-point type, and when I got the actual book in the mail, in my greedy inky hands, I pawed through the whole thing (actually reading guest editor Cynthia Ozick’s terrific essay first before looking for my own, a rare case of sense temporarily defeating selfishness), savoring the typeface and the shocking fact that my long wandering essay on being an altar boy was between essays by J.M. Coetzee and Andre Dubus, and digging the remarkable blue-green cover, and thinking confused and jumbled thoughts about being an essayist, and having reached, in some sense, a pinnacle or peak or apex or zenith as an essayist, and pondering all the thousands of people who would pick up this volume and read my piece and wonder who the hell is Brian Doyle?, and other such interesting thoughts, and then I drove home, to my lovely wife and three small children, and whereas the kids were five and three and three years old, things were chaotic and harried at dinner, but we got everyone to bed eventually, and I did the dishes, and my lovely wife did the laundry, and then I insisted on opening a good bottle of wine, ceremoniously, so as to milk the whole celebratory thing of being in Best American Essays between Coetzee and Dubus, and with great flair and panache and pride I handed the volume to my lovely bride, who exclaimed and exulted in deeply satisfying fashion, and hugged me and kissed me, and she was really and truly delighted, she is a most genuine and emotionally open soul, and then, as we sipped our excellent wine, she pawed through the book too, and finally flipped it over and read down the list of contributors, in alphabetical order, and then she said, unforgettably, this:

“Wow – Saul Bellow, Joseph Epstein, Ian Frazier, Edward Hoagland, Jamaica Kincaid, William Maxwell, John McPhee, Mary Oliver, Oliver Sacks, John Updike….Brian Doyle? Doesn’t that sound funny? Bellow, Updike, Doyle?”

That’s what I remember best, her absolute honest innocent question, and my instant urge to shout “NO THAT DOES NOT SOUND FUNNY! THAT SOUNDS TOTALLY COOL AND RIGHT AND AWESOME AND I AM A GOLDEN ESSAY GOD!” But by happy chance, and perhaps for once a modicum of grace granted me by a merciful fate, I did not shout those words, because suddenly I realized that she was right, and it was ridiculous to be in the same sentence with Saul Bellow and Mary Oliver, and I burst out laughing, and she did too, and we laughed so hard we woke up one of the twins, who took about an hour to wrestle back to bed. Then we finished our wine and went to bed too, grinning.

Brian Doyle’s most recent books are the essay collections Reading in Bed and So Very Much the Best of Us.

Tommy Mira y Lopez on Charles Baxter's "What Happens in Hell"

Reading Charles Baxter’s “What Happens in Hell,” I find myself continually impressed by each sentence’s ability to do two things at once. This is no surprise given Baxter’s body of work and capabilities as a writer—it’s a given that the writing’s working in more ways than one—yet what stands out to me is that Baxter’s sentences work in both ways I notice and ways I do not. I imagine it’s like when I turn on the hot water for a shower in my house and my roommate’s shower in the casita out back turns cold: I know I do the one thing, but I don’t instinctively recognize that the one thing leads to the other.

Needless to say, as a fiction writer and an essayist, Baxter does another two things at once. What happens when we read a fiction writer in the guise of an essayist for the first time and vice versa? What differentiates the narrative of a particular writer’s essay from the narrative of a particular writer’s short story? If I had been reading the red cover of this year’s Best American series instead of the green cover, would I have questioned whether I was reading a story or not? The overall movement of Baxter’s essay is towards the artfully staggered narrative I find so often in his fiction: we begin with Baxter the narrator and his town car driver, a Pakistani American named Niazi, conversing over what happens in hell while driving through Palo Alto (Baxter is on his way to Stanford to teach a class as a visiting writer); this incident triggers a bout of schadenfreude and the revelation of the deeper sadness present in Baxter’s life (his loneliness, his recent separation from his wife); armed with this, we return several weeks later to another car ride with Baxter and Niazi, a ride that leads to an nearly fatal crash, the narrative’s dramatic climax and the moment when the conversation about what happens in hell merges with something closer to reality; from here, the drama lessens and we move towards conclusion and Baxter’s attempt to forgive Niazi.

Given the decisive turn it takes in its middle, Baxter’s essay deserves the sort of praise we reserve for the type of workshop friendly short stories and essays (JoAnn Beard’s “Fourth State of Matter” comes most readily to mind) that tell us everything we need to know in their first page without giving away the plot or element of surprise. Baxter’s sentences apply to both the present moment and the moment to come; they are tinged with a humor that both masks and welcomes. When Niazi tells Baxter that “there is no forgiveness over there. There is forgiveness over here but not there,” we take it as evidence of a slightly loony if not fundamentalist character without expressly realizing that this sentiment will play out to be true, that Baxter himself will be unable to forgive Niazi after he falls asleep at the wheel and drives into a hellish car wreck. When after one of Niazi’s pronouncements, Baxter decides “to drink some more of his bottled water,” we’re aware of the irony and complicity of this action—water amidst a discussion of fire and Hell, privilege swigged in the face of the unprivileged—but cannot recognize its full poignancy until the car is flipping over on its way down the hill and, as Niazi screams, Baxter watches the bottle of water floating in front of him.

The ability to wrangle this much out of a sentence isn’t so much a product of the genre Baxter’s working in as it is a result of careful, considered writing. The qualities of the above examples—the telling detail, the foreshadowing line of dialogue, the true subject masked by the triggering subject—are as likely to occur in a Charles Baxter short story as a Charles Baxter essay. They’re a staple. Yet what of the sentences that provide something specifically because they are present in something termed an essay and not a short story? Do such sentences exist? What of those moments that find traction here because Baxter is ostensibly essaying (or aware that he’s essaying and thus allowed whatever artificial constructs and constraints we allow the essayist) and not short-storying? Is this at all a valid distinction to make, much less to try and elucidate? I’m not so much speaking about Baxter’s liberty to pull quotes or include anecdotes from Alice Munro or Nietzsche (what we might think of as privileged to the essayist), but his ability to close or widen the gap he inhabits as an author, to near or pull away from the subject and moment at hand—in other words, to turn on the heat in one place to create cold in another.

I’m reluctant to use these terms essaying and short-storying. How do I really know what these mean? I tell myself that Baxter’s allowed to do one thing because I’ve flipped open this year’s Best American Essays but not another because I’ve flipped open Best American Short Stories (I guess, along with Alice Munro, he’s going for something of an EGOT here). I think back to TaraShea Nesbit’s post from the previous week and what smart sense she makes when she writes “I don’t mind calling essays stories, or calling stories essays. There is a reason why we make this slip: essays have an arc, stories have embedded questions.” Presumably, Baxter should just be allowed to do Baxter. Yet still I look for ways that a Baxter essay differentiates itself from a Baxter short story, still I think how clever it would be of an essay to disguise itself as a short story until it comes time to reveal its intent.

Consider, for example, how Baxter narrates two car crashes. One is from the short story “Saul and Patsy are Getting Comfortable in Michigan,” collected in Through The Safety Net and the other is from “What Happens in Hell.” In “Saul and Patsy…”, the crash comes at the story’s end. Saul and Patsy are driving back from a party, drunk and late at night, their car alone on State Highway 14 in rural Michigan. The narration begins within Saul’s dreams and then shoots out: “He did not even realize he was shutting his eyes. He was dreaming of Patsy, sleeping within arms’ reach. Patsy, whom he loved all the way down to the root. Then he was dreaming of Mrs. O’Neill, carrying a gigantic plate of chocolate chip cookies. And Bart Connell and the barber, asleep on their feet. The two red taillights of the car went around a corner that wasn’t there; then one of them moved up directly above the other. Then it came down again hard, on the wrong side, and began blinking.”

This moment comes down upon us as a dual surprise: the car has crashed, leaving the fates of Saul and Patsy up in the air, yet the narrative distance has also zoomed out. We end with the stark and gentle image of the two out-of-place taillights, an acknowledgment of devastation yet a refusal to rubberneck. The drama in this scene comes from both its events—the hinted at yet unexpected car crash, the unknown consequences—and its shift in detail, its ability to separate itself from its subject and leave its reader with an image—those blinking taillights—impossible to shake from one’s mind.

Compare this to Baxter’s narration of his own crash in “What Happens in Hell”: “California drivers aren’t used to precipitation, so when the car began to lose control, Niazi woke up and slammed on the brakes, throwing the Lincoln into a sideways skid…From the moment the car began to lose control until it came to rest, Niazi was screaming. All during the time we turned over down that hill, he continued to scream. Reader, this essay is about that scream. Please do your best to imagine it.”

Please do your best to imagine it! If “Saul and Patsy’s” narration refocuses distance, here the narration refocuses address, if not the essay’s intended meaning. Tone subverts content and environment. We are in a constrained, intimate space—our narrator is literally inside the overturning car, we have reached our utmost physical proximity—yet the event is not only narrated with lucidity and detachment, but with the essayist’s love of relaying knowledge (“California drivers aren’t used to precipitation…”) and penchant for conversational address, an address that runs throughout the essay but is never as overt as it is here with its “Dear Reader.” The drama and surprise in this scene don’t have to do so much with the severity of the car accident (while that’s certainly there, the narrative tension is lessened since we at least know our protagonist’s well enough to be writing about it), as they do with the responsibility that Baxter places into his reader’s hands. He asks us not just to recreate a moment outside the realm of personal experience (i.e. a moment we’d have to imagine and/or fictionalize), but a moment upon which the essay’s characterizations and the ideas presented by those characters hinge. The moment where what the characters do to one another (Niazi asks Baxter to imagine what happens in hell, that is to imagine the unimaginable) becomes what the essayist does to the reader. That, I would argue is the true drama of this essay—a sentence’s ability to turn an essay’s direction, to step back and demand speculation, to take us out of one situation and insert us in another, a new reality we must confront in order to make our way through, as if it really had been us in the car all along. And there, I guess, is the rub. I write the above to applaud the power a sentence contains, a power I’ve decided as unique to the essay, but I don’t realize I’ve done two things at once (I am no Baxter), that the sentiment described—this new reality we must confront to take us out of one situation and insert us into another—reads on second glance like a power of fiction.

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Tommy Mira y Lopez is pursuing his MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of Arizona. His work appears or will appear in PANK, Green Briar Review, Seneca Review, and CutBank. He's the nonfiction editor of Sonora Review and an assistant editor at Fairy Tale Review. 

Best American Essays 2011

Just got my hands on a copy today. Haven't had a chance to read through it yet (except for Robert Atwan's foreword, which is actually pretty great). I'll probably try and put together a more comprehensive look at the anthology, but I wanted to put this post in as a chance for some preliminary conversation: Does BAE give us an accurate representation of the Essay? Will the "Notable Essays" section continue to be more interesting? Will magazines outside of New York get more recognition? Let me know what y'all are thinking and I can try to talk about it more in an upcoming review.

Purpose of the "Best American" Series

I'm about halfway through this year's Best American Essays, so maybe this is unfair of me to say, but so far the individual essays have all felt exactly the same: they all seem heavily researched, which isn't a bad thing, but they rely so much on content (as opposed to voice, a new perspective on the narrator based on the research, etc) that they aren't necessarily compelling unless you are interested in the subject matter. Even the subjects, for the most part have felt similar: writing about the lives of writers/academics--there's been an essay looking at Tolstoy, another on Einstein, one on Isenberg's visits with four different scholars/writers that might need an entirely different post to articulate why it shouldn't be anywhere near a Best American anything, an essay on Montaigne, an essay opening on a scene with Nabokov...

This isn't to mention the fact that it's mostly essays written by men, and that a majority of the collection is made up of essays from the bigger magazines like Harper's, The Atlantic, The New Yorker or NY Times Book Review or any other publication with 'New York' in the title. Meanwhile, a majority of the notable essays are from a more diverse set of smaller journals/publications.

Anyway, none of this should come as a surprise (the big magazines always have a significant representation in the Best American series), but it does have me questioning the purpose of the Best American anthology, and why so many similar essays would be put into a collection where there were a lot of opportunities for a variety of voices and content. Here's a couple theories:

1) In my mind, the anthology should be a venue for highlighting the diversity of a genre in terms of style and content (for many readers, this might be the only time all year they pick up a collection of essays, or short stories, or whatever). Furthermore, it seems like a wider variety of journals/publications would be ideal, especially when they could give attention to lesser known writing venues and writers that would benefit from the distinction, but it doesn't seem like that's necessarily the mission of the series.

2) It's simply a venue for that year's editor (in this case, Christopher Hitchens) to put forth the writing they're most interested in. If an editor were particularly interested in, say, reading profiles on famous writers, then they could go ahead and publish fifteen of them and call it a day.

3) It's an opportunity for that year's editor to set forth an agenda/message on where they see the genre heading, or what they'd like to see more of, or something along those lines.

Anyway, I don't want this to sound like a rant about me not agreeing with Hitchens' choices as an editor, but I'm honestly curious as to what people see as the purpose of this type of anthology.

Best American Essays 2010 Table of Contents

I haven't had a chance to read through it yet, but figured I'd post the Table of Contents here, as its nearly impossible to find anywhere else (every year they keep their contributor's a mystery, it's pretty bizarre):

Elif Batuman- The Murder of Leo Tolstoy (Harper's)
Toni Bentley- The Bad Lion (NY Review of Books)
Jane Churchon- The Dead Book (The Sun)
Brian Doyle- Irreconcilable Dissonance (Oregon Humanities)
John Gamel- The Elegant Eyeball (Alaska Quarterly Review)
Walter Isaacson- How Einstein Divided America's Jews (The Atlantic)
Steven L. Isenberg- Lunching on Olympus (The American Scholar)
Jane Kramer- Me, Myself, and I (The New Yorker)
Arthur Krystal- When Writers Speak (NY Times Book Review)
Matt Labash- A Rake's Progress (The Weekly Standard)
Phillip Lopate- Brooklyn the Unknowable (Harvard Review)
Ian McEwan- On John Updike (NY Review of Books)
Steven Pinker- My Genome, My Self (NY Times Magazine)
Ron Rindo- Gyromancy (Gettysburg Review)
David Sedaris- Guy Walks into a Bar Car (New Yorker)
Zadie Smith- Speaking in Tongues (NY Review of Books)
S. Frederick Starr- Rediscovering Central Asia (Wilson Quarterly)
John H. Summers- Gettysburg Regress (The New Republic)
John Edgar Wideman- Fatheralong (Harper's)
Garry Wills- Daredevil (The Atlantic)
James Wood- A Fine Range (The New Yorker)

Not sure what to think of this list yet, but I'm sure y'all will have your own reviews/thoughts. Mainly, I'm hoping that we won't get a dozen essays about the process of writing, as last year's edition felt pretty overwhelmed with the subject. As always, I find myself more drawn to the Notable Essays in the back, where one finds a more interesting variety (as well as a few familiar names/contributors to this blog, congratulations all.)