Some Essays Very Good; Other Essays, Not So Good
Written: Dec 06 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Some essays very good.
Cons: Other essays, not so good.
The Bottom Line: Some essays very good; other essays, not so good.
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| Lobstergirl's Full Review: The Best American Essays 2000 |
Something unmistakable washes over me as I flip through each new installment of the Best American Essays series: a sense of déjà vu. Each year the series editor culls, from a presumably large number of American publications, 50 to 100 of the best essays, from which the volume editor then plucks the most promising 25 or so. John Updike, Jamaica Kincaid, Edward Hoagland, William Gass – the list of repeat offenders over the years is lengthy. This is not necessarily a terrible thing, but it certainly points to either the insularity of the little cosmos of essayists or to the consistency of series editor Robert Atwan’s favorite writers.
The Best American Essays 2000 is long on illness, frailty and death. In The Resurrectionist, Richard McCann writes about how his liver transplant makes him feel complicit in the pain and death of another person. He has been resurrected from certain death, yet he is also a resurrectionist – in 19th century parlance, someone who ransacked graves, sold corpses, and trafficked in body parts. Sometimes at night he tries to imagine his donor; was he male or female? He massages the skin over the new liver and whispers condolences as if to comfort the troubled spirit of the deceased. In The Force of Spirit, Scott Russell Sanders drives with his wife to visit her father who is slowly dying of congestive heart failure. He tries to find a name for the force that keeps his father-in-law just barely animated; it’s the same force that binds him to his wife, that courses through lambs groping for a teat and leaves reaching for the sun. It’s “larger than life” and “tougher than love” and ultimately no word is adequate, but he settles on spirit because we simply can’t conceive it without also conceiving of the sacred. Sanders reflects on the death of his wife’s mother and clearing out her things, and how they found
more than forty Bibles….which she had long since lost the ability to read….we found entry forms for sweepstakes, because she had decided, as her mind began to go, that winning some game of chance might set things right. And we found lists she had made of crucial events in her life – her marriage, her children’s births, her surgeries, her husband’s heart attack, the death of her parents, the moves from house to house – all the personal history that was slipping away from her. On page after page in a spiral notebook she wrote down in broken phrases what mattered to her, what defined her life, as if words on paper might preserve what the mind no longer could hold.
His essay, Sanders tells us, is also an exercise in delaying loss and preserving meaning, “in sentences and paragraphs rather than broken phrases.”
Floyd Skloot in Gray Area: Thinking With a Damaged Brain describes the mental, physical, and ontological effects of the virus that ravaged part of his brain – “an insult to the brain”, in the jargon of neurology. Connections between axons and synapses have been destroyed, resulting in all sorts of daily complications: he can’t follow directions for assembling a vacuum cleaner or figure out how pillows go into pillowcases. He might say “pass the sawdust” rather than “pass the rice” he can’t cook and converse at the same time, and attending basketball games is too exhausting, a visual and aural overload. Because the brain determines how and who we are, he is now a different person. In Heroin(e), Cheryl Strayed juxtaposes her mother’s death from cancer with her own descent into heroin addiction. It’s a lovely essay, sad and penetrating; “it is perhaps the greatest misperception of the death of a loved one,” she writes, “that it will end there, that death itself will be the largest blow.” Her title is not accidental. Recovered from her addiction, she looks back on heroin as a person that she “met and loved intensely” but, like her mother, must live without.
My favorite essay of the bunch is Mary Gordon’s Rome: The Visible City. As with a place that one reads about or looks at pictures of before visiting, Rome takes shape in her imagination, from childhood on, through a View-Master and then classic films like Three Coins in a Fountain, Roman Holiday, and La Dolce Vita. Rome through the View-Master was a series of still images – St. Peter’s, the Vatican, Pope Pius XII, immobilized and frozen in time. Rome in films was about falling in love, insouciantly, and Audrey Hepburn on a Vespa. After La Dolce Vita, Gordon and her friends yearn “for the possibility of never being surprised, therefore, never being made to look foolish. We think this might happen to us if we ride in Alfa Romeo convertibles and have so much sex that it no longer seems extraordinary.” The first time Gordon travels to Rome, with her unhappily married husband and wheelchair-bound mother, she is miserable. Her suffering (spending most of her time with her mother in the pensione, playing cards) is akin to that of the early Church martyrs. She goes back again and again, once to interview a famous Italian writer, but mostly just to be a tourist, wandering the streets alone, not minding getting lost. When in Rome she is a person “who lives by the eye.” The essay closes with her reflection, as she sits by the Villa Borghese, that while Rome is a place born in and shaped by her eye, she has become a person whom she never could have envisioned: “How has it happened that I have become someone who, as a child, I would never even have thought of? Someone I would not have seen on holy cards or in movies? Someone I might not even have read about?”
Gordon’s essay is one of three that examine cities as loci of both anticipation and memory. In The Last Time I Saw Paris, the Egyptian writer André Aciman romances the city in his mind as a boy. “Before I had ever set foot there, France was already my homeland, the place to which I knew I would eventually return,” he writes. The Synthetic Sublime is Cynthia Ozick’s topology of New York – topography overlaid with history – and her opening sentence, “More than any other metropolis of the Western world, New York disappears”, has particular resonance after 9/11.
The funniest and most quotable piece is Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s At a Certain Age. It’s not so much about getting old as getting older, and more about perceptions of aging than the tangible process. The phrase “a certain age” is of course applied to women; what it’s a euphemism for, precisely, I’ve never known. Is a woman of a certain age 45? 55? I imagine it must be like pornography; you know it when you see it, or when you reach it. But I don’t think you have to be a certain age in order to verify Schwartz’s assertion that
one of the many things young people don’t know is that everyone no longer chronologically young is privately young, or at least younger; we all have an age at which, subjectively, we stopped aging. We were comfortable there and remained: perhaps it’s the age at which we felt fully ourselves, or felt finally grown up. But if we each have an optimum age, what happens when we pass it? We lead a kind of double life, one life in the actual world, where the numbers accumulate, and the other in a temporal no man’s land.
There are a few duds in the volume (personally, I fail to see what everyone else seems to see in Edwidge Danticat and Jamaica Kincaid), but overall it’s worth the perusal, and some of the essays merit a second and third reading.
The other essays in the volume are:
In Distrust of Movements, Wendell Berry
The Joys and Perils of Victimhood, Ian Buruma
A Son in Shadow, Fred D’Aguiar
Westbury Court, Edwidge Danticat
In Defense of the Book, William Gass
Earth’s Eye, Edward Hoagland
Those Words That Echo…Echo…Echo Through Life, Jamaica Kincaid
If You Are What You Eat, Then What Am I?, Geeta Kothari
The Singer Solution to World Poverty, Peter Singer
Listening For Silence, Mark Slouka
What’s So Bad About Hate?, Andrew Sullivan
A Designer Universe, Steven Weinberg
A Shark in the Mind of One Contemplating Wilderness, Terry Tempest Williams
Recommended:
Yes
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