12:35 p.m.--the phone rings. This is not my favorite way to wake up. My favorite way to wake up is to have a certain French movie star whisper to me softly at 2:30 in the afternoon that if I want to get to Sweden in time to pick up my Nobel Prize for Literature, I had better ring for breakfast. This occurs rather less often than one might wish.

--Fran Lebowitz, "My Day: An Introduction of Sorts"

Different people have very different notions of what constitutes 'cool.' I know people who think of James Dean as cool, people who think of Michael Jordan as cool, people who even think of PeeWee Herman as cool (which he sort of is, in a way).

If you asked me to boil down 'cool' to its essence, though--to refine it like so much oil or render it like so much fat--I would play you a few bars of John Coltrane or of Miles Davis or, better still, a whole tune featuring Coltrane and Davis together.

For essentially I believe that cool is something humans make, not something they are. However, if you pointed a gun to my head--which there's no reason to do, since I'm on the very verge of making my way to my point--and asked me what human in the history of the planet most perfectly embodied cool, I wouldn't blink twice before giving you my answer:

Fran Lebowitz.

Indulge me, gentle reader, and do whatever it takes to enlarge that tiny picture floating off to the right of Ms. Lebowitz. Take a look at her, sprawling across those theater seats. I defy you to deny that she is the very quintessence of cool.

Lebowitz is an essayist in the traditional sense, the sense that Montaigne intended when he referred to his own productions as 'essays.' Perhaps 'attempts' is not quite as precise a translation of the term as 'tryings.' An essay is a feat of trying, an effort to try one's wit against one's subject at the same time that one's subject is tried against one's wit. An essay is a struggle, a wrestling match, a gritty and perhaps even erotic sort of tussle that lasts as long as it takes and leaves us panting afterwards. At least, that's what I think makes a good essay.

And the people who know how to write good essays are rare indeed, far rarer than you might think. Montaigne, of course, springs to mind. And there is the too often forgotten Aldous Huxley. Most memorably, perhaps, The New Yorker gave us gifted essayists in Robert Benchley, E.B. White, and Dorothy Parker.

But when I absolutely need to be swept off my feet by an essay, seduced by an intelligence that charms me with its superiority to my own, I have learned that I need look no further than Fran Lebowitz.

Many of the subjects that Lebowitz engages may seem dated to the young reader of today. She can offer no more compelling defense of their seeming irrelevance than this: "in this singularly dull and retroactive era, to require timeliness of a writer, when it is no longer even required of timeliness, is not only grossly unfair, but also unseemly."

Lebowitz is as cynical as W.C. Fields without being as callous. Where Fields might say that a man who hates dogs and kids can't be all bad, Lebowitz contends that children, though sticky, are amusing because of how much fun it is to teach them to smoke.

She writes about everything from manners to war, from how not to marry a millionaire to why she really loves sleep. What sets the great essayists apart is their ability to exhort. Their messages are not only clear and succinct, but fiery and irresistible. They write with the passion of proselytes even when advocating the most absurd kinds of behavior. Lebowitz is so natural an exhorter that she really can get away with exhorting us to do anything--things that we would never do, things that we would do anyway.

And we love her for it.

If any one book should be required reading for epinioneers, it is The Fran Lebowitz Reader. There's not a writer among us that couldn't learn half a dozen tricks from any one of Lebowitz's essays. This is a book for people who like to think, for people who like to imagine that other people think, and for people who want to know how to con others into thinking that they think. It's a blueprint for the construction of wit, a roadmap to eloquence, an owner's manual for intelligence.

Knowing that I lack Lebowitz's subtlety in the exhortation department, I'll come out and clobber you with my message: Buy this book.


Recommended: Yes