The Best American Essays 2004
- Book Review,
by Louis Menand (Editor)
From Publishers Weekly
Medical trauma is a recurrent theme in the latest edition of Houghton Mifflin’s popular Best American reprints series, which is edited this year by The Metaphysical Club author Menand. In her essay "An Enlarged Heart," poet Cynthia Zarin recalls the anxiety and helplessness of caring for a seriously ill child. "A Sudden Illness" by Laura Hillenbrand (Seabiscuit) chronicles her fight against an untreatable illness that would confine her to bed for days at a time. And Gerald Stern’s "Bullet in My Neck" reveals that the author is so accustomed to his injury that he never thinks of it, "only when the subject comes up and someone—full of doubt or amazement—gingerly reaches a hand out to feel it." Menand also selects several pieces of cultural criticism: Rick Moody’s "Against Cool," Alex Ross’s "Rock 101" and Wayne Koestenbaum’s head-spinning tour of the explosion of AIDS in New York during the 1980s. Humor makes appearances in Anne Fadiman’s "The Arctic Hedonist" and Leonard Michael’s recollection of growing up in New York’s Jewish culture, "My Yiddish." But it’s the artful, unsentimental examination of personal experience—stunningly exemplified in Kathryn Chetkovich’s "Envy"—that really glues these disparate pieces together. Only two them—Jared Diamond’s essay on the inevitability of environmental devastation and Adam Gopnik’s extended critique of the Matrix Reloaded—dispense with the first-person altogether. Although regular readers of the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Threepenny Review and Granta may have encountered at least a few of these works before, each of these essays merits rereading. They may even be improved by each other’s fine company.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
One of the many pleasures found in each year's incarnation of this consistently refined and lively series is the guest editor's introductory essay. It will come as no surprise that Louis Menand, author of the highly acclaimed The Metaphysical Club (2001), begins by musing over the metaphysical properties of writing, particularly what we mean by voice, but his description of writing as a form of singing is unexpected and felicitous, as is his confession that he chose most of these essays by ear. So whose voices seduced Menand? James Agee, in a long-lost and hard-hitting rumination on hatred and violence, and, in another discovery, Tennessee Williams, on becoming a playwright. Then there's Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond on the collapse of civilizations and today's precarious environmental realities; Laura Hillenbrand, author of the best-selling Seabiscuit (2001), on her horrendous bout with chronic fatigue syndrome; as well as Cynthia Ozick, Kyoko Mori, Luc Sante, the poet Gerald Stern, and 14 other superb stylists and crisp thinkers. Menand's selections make for a particularly stimulating and sonorous essay collection. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
Since 1986, The Best American Essays has gathered the best nonfiction writing of the year, establishing itself as the best-selling anthology of its kind. In this year's edition Louis Menand writes, "Most of the essays in this volume were picked by ear. I was searching for voices. Some are cool and some are anti-cool. I like both. There are many subjects here -- for the subject, to a point, doesn't matter. Still, as a reader, my favorite kind of essay is the one that makes a lost time present -- the essay that tells me how it was in New York City in the 1970s, or on a Manhattan bus in the 1940s, or at a midwestern high school, or during a summer on Cape Cod." Selfishly -- and why shouldn't an editor be selfish? -- I like to read stories about my own times. I never get tired of it. I feel as though I could do it forever, and I probably will." Jonathan Franzen remembers emblematic late nights on the high school roof, Wayne Koestenbaum revisits his own literary coming of age in the 1980s, and Rick Moody's exegesis of cool is set against the disclaimer that "I was and am an interloper. I am, in fact, uncool." This volume opens with an extraordinary find from Oxford American: a previously unpublished work by James Agee, the author of A Death in the Family and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. "America, Look at Your Shame!," discovered misfiled with Agee's poetry manuscripts, underscores a searing personal awakening that feels as essential now as it did when it was first written sixty years ago.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction: VoicesYou cannot taste a work of prose. It has no color and it makesno sound. Its shape is without significance. When people talkabout writing, though, they often use adjectives borrowed from activitieswhose products make a more direct appeal to the senses —painting, sculpture, music, cuisine. People say, "The writing is colorful,"or "pungent," or "shapeless," or "lyrical," and no one asksthem where, exactly, they perceive those qualities. Discussions of"tone" and "texture" are carried on in the complete ontological absenceof such things. (You could say that so are discussions of"meaning," but that"s another philosophical problem.) Writing is averbal artifact that, as it is being decoded, stimulates sensationsthat are unique to writing but that, for some reason, often have tobe described in terms of nonverbal experiences.One of the most mysterious of writing"s immaterial propertiesis what people call its "voice." Editors sometimes refer to it, in aphrase that underscores the paradox at the heart of the idea, as the"voice on the page." Many editors think that a voice is what makesgreat writing great. Most writers do, too. Prose can show many virtues,including originality, without having a voice. It may be packedsolid with intellectual nutrients; upon its import, much may seemto depend. It may avoid cliché, radiate conviction, be grammaticallyso clean that your grandmother could eat off it. But none ofthis has anything to do with this elusive entity, a "voice." There areprobably all kinds of literary sins that prevent a piece of writingfrom having a voice, but there seems to be no guaranteed techniquefor creating one."Voice" is sometimes associated with "style," but they are not alwaysthe same. Writing can be stylish and still be voiceless, and thisis as true of the plain, "just the facts" style as it is of the style of highfiguration. Ingenuity, wit, sarcasm, euphony, frequent outbreaks ofthe first-person singular — any of these can enliven prose withoutgiving it a voice. Of all the intangibles of good writing, voice isprobably the most transcendental. You can set the stage as elaboratelyas you like, but either the phantom appears or it doesn"t.When it does make an appearance, the subject matter is often irrelevant."I do not care for movies very much and I rarely seethem," W. H. Auden wrote to the editors of The Nation in 1944;"further, I am suspicious of criticism as the literary genre which,more than any other, recruits epigones, pedants without insight,intellectuals without love. I am all the more surprised, therefore, tofind myself not only reading Mr. Agee before I read anyone else inThe Nation but also consciously looking forward all week to readinghim again." A lot of the movies James Agee reviewed between 1942and 1948, when he was The Nation"s film critic, were negligiblethen and are forgotten now. Auden was not merely being a curmudgeon.But you can still read those columns with pleasure. Theycontinue to pass the ultimate test of good writing: it is more painfulto stop reading them than it is to keep going. When you get tothe end of Agee"s sentences, you wish, like Auden, that there weremore sentences.Writing that has a voice is writing that has something like a personality.But whose personality is it? As with most things in art,there is no straight road from the product back to the person whomade it. There are writers read and loved for their humor who arenot especially funny people, and writers read and loved for their eloquencewho, in conversation, swallow their words or can"t seem tofinish a sentence. Wisdom on the page correlates with wisdom inthe writer about as frequently as a high batting average correlateswith a high IQ: they just seem to have very little to do with one another.Charming people can produce prose of sneering sententiousness,and cranky neurotics can, to their readers, seem to be inexhaustiblydelightful. Personal drabness, through some obscureneural kink, can deliver verbal blooms. Readers who meet writerswhose voice they have fallen in love with usually need to make asmall adjustment in order to hang on to their infatuation.Some confusion about what it means for writing to have a voicearises from the metaphor itself. Many readers, and many writers,for that matter, think that effectiveness in writing has something todo with how close it is to speech. Writers often claim that theynever write something that they would not say. It is hard to knowhow this could be literally true. Speech is somatic, a bodily function,and it is accompanied by physical inflections (tone of voice,winks, smiles, raised eyebrows, hand gestures) that are not reproduciblein writing. Spoken language is repetitive, fragmentary,contradictory, ambiguous, loaded down with space holders (like,um, you know what I"m saying) — pretty much all the things writingteachers tell students not to do. But speakers are generally understoodright away. You don"t have to hear a sentence three timesbefore you get it. On the other hand, you often have to read a sentencethree times, occasionally even a well-written one. As a medium,writing is a million times weaker than speech. It"s a hieroglyphcompeting with a symphony.The other reason that speech is a bad metaphor for writing isthat writing, for 99 percent of people who do it, is the opposite ofspontaneous. Some writers write many drafts of a piece, and somewrite one draft, at the pace of a snail. But chattiness, slanginess, inyour-face-ness, and any other feature of writing that is conventionallycharacterized as "like speech" are all usually the results ofintense experimentation, revision, calibrating, walks around theblock, unnecessary phone calls, and recalibrating. Writers are peoplein whom l"esprit de l"escalier is a recurrent experience: they arealways thinking of the perfect riposte when the moment for sayingit has already passed. So they wait a few years and put it in print.Writers are not mere copyists of language; they are polishers,embellishers, perfecters. They are people who spend hours gettingthe timing exactly right — so that it sounds absolutely unrehearsed.There"s a wonderful story about the gap between speech andwriting. It features the British critic Desmond McCarthy. McCarthywas a member of the Bloomsbury group, and, apparently, a legendarytalker. His friends thought that his writing, which he producedreluctantly, gave a poor idea of his conversational gifts. So theyhired a stenographer and invited McCarthy over. They hid the stenographeroutside the door and had McCarthy hold forth. McCar-thy obliged his friends by discoursing brilliantly for an hour or so,and then left. The friends waited impatiently for the transcriptionof his conversation to arrive. It did. They read it. The writing wascompletely banal.Still, the claim that the written "voice" is an artificial constructionof language, deliberate and self-conscious or impersonal andaccidental but never spontaneous and natural, is not a claim mostwriters could accept. Writing is personal; it feels personal. The unfunnyperson who is a humorous writer does not think, of herwork, "That"s not me." Critics speak of a literary persona, which isa device for compelling a divorce between the author and the text.But no one, or almost no one, writes "as a persona." People write aspeople, and if there were nothing personal about the outcome, fewwould bother with it. Composition is a labor-intensive business.And what makes it especially so is that the rate of production is beyondthe writer"s control. The words don"t just appear on a conveyorbelt, and you package them up. You have to wait, and whatyou are waiting for is something inside you to come up with thewords. That something, for writers, is the voice.The real basis for the metaphor of voice in writing is not speaking.It is singing. You cannot know a singer from her speech, andalthough "natural phrasing" and "from the heart" are prized attributesof song, actually singing that way requires rehearsal, preparation,and getting in touch with whatever it is inside singers that, bya neural kink or the grace of God, enables them to turn themselvesinto vessels of musical sound. Right before he walked onstage atthe opera house, Luciano Pavarotti is reported to have taken a bigbite of an apple. That"s how he helped his voice to sound fresh,spontaneous, and natural.What writers hear, when they are trying to write, is somethingmore like singing than like speaking. Inside your head, you"reyakking away to yourself all the time. Getting that down on paper isa depressing, Desmond McCarthy–like experience. What you aretrying to do when you write is to transpose the yakking into verbalmusic; and the voice inside, when you find it, which can take hoursor days or weeks, is not your speaking voice. It is your singing voice— except that it comes out as writing. Writers labor under two anxieties.The first is that the voice that they found a hundred times inthe past has gone forever, that they will never listen to it again. Theother is that, having finally found it this time, they will lose it againbefore the piece is finished. Then, they know that, having sung itssong, it will disappear again. This is the voice people are surprisednot to encounter when they "meet the writer." The writer is not sosurprised. One day, he or she will be back in front of the paper orthe keyboard and have to find the voice all over again. Some writers,when they begin a new piece, spend hours frantically rereadingtheir old stuff, trying to remember how they did it. Rereadingrarely works, because nothing works reliably. Sooner or later, normallylater than everyone involved would like, the voice shows up,takes a bite out of the apple, and walks onstage.Most of the essays in this volume were picked by ear. I was searchingfor voices. Some are cool and some are anti-cool. I like both.There are many subjects here — for the subject, to a point, doesn"tmatter. Still, as a reader, my favorite kind of essay is the one thatmakes a lost time present — the essay that tells me how it was inNew York City in the 1970s, or on a Manhattan bus in the 1940s, orat a midwestern high school, or during a summer on Cape Cod.Selfishly — and why shouldn"t an editor be selfish? — I like to readstories about my own times. I never get tired of it. I feel as though Icould do it forever, and I probably will.Writing is a window. It opens onto vanished feelings and vanishedworlds. Often it is the only window there is, the only accesswe will ever have to those things. It is more than a mere record, likea photograph, because it is also a sensibility, a point of view, a voice.It is the place where, fifty or a hundred years from now, people willgo to see — or to hear — what it was like to be alive when we werealive. We were alive in 2003, and these pieces are part of whatremains.Louis MenandCopyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin. Introduction copyright © 2004 by Louis Menand. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
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