The Best American Essays [Paperback]

Each year, I rate each essay in the current volume of this laudable series, wandering back after the passage of some time to see if my views have remained stable. Usually, for better or worse, my opinions do not vary much as the years pass--probably the sign of a stilted and boring personality.

This year's volume seems particularly rich to me.

Cynthia Ozick's essay "The Synthetic Sublime," an homage to New York City, is my favorite. It is a stylistic tour de force which for me echoes James and Wharton, two other writers with New York on their minds.

Eight others merit my highest rating: Fred D'Aguiar's poignant "A Son in Shadow," where the author attempts to capture in an amber prose the father whom he never knew; William Gass's "In Defense of the Book," an erudite and witty apologia for the printed page; Richard McCann's "The Resurrectionist," a sensitive exploration of a liver transplant; Scott Russell Sander's heart-of-the-country meditation on mortality and God, "The Force of Spirit"; Lynne Sharon Schwartz's sardonic "At a Certain Age," a more comic take on mortality; Peter Singer's provocative (and slightly annoying) "The Singer Solution to World Poverty" (in which Mr. Singer reveals to me that he must be a lucky man without credit card debt or a thankless job); Floyd Skloot's astonishing "Gray Area: Thinking with a Damaged Brain," which reveals a remarkable life force hard at work in a man who refuses to give up after a virus destroyed much of his brain; and Mark Slouka's "Listening for Silence," a much needed commentary on our noisy modern world.

High marks also go to Ian Burma's "The Joys and Perils of Victimhood," which rightly warns against the Romantic cult of kitsch and death often growing out of communal suffering, where rationality takes a backseat to sentiment; Edwidge Danticat's "Westbury Court," a Brooklyn childhood remembrance; Mary Gordon's "Rome: The Visible City," an idiosyncratic contrast between the sacred and secular in this ancient yet modern city; Edward Hoagland's "Earth's Eye," a lovely meditation on water and Nature; Jamaica Kincaid's postmodern "Those Words That Echo...Echo...Echo through Life," an essay less about her father (its starting point) than about the mysteriousness of the Particular; Geeta Kothari's humorous and pungent memoir on culture-clash and food, "If You Are What You Eat, Then What Am I?"; and Terry Tempest Williams' clever analysis of wilderness as Art, "A Shark in the Mind..."

I also loved the ending of Andre Aciman's "The Last Time I Saw Paris," which for me validated the essay as a whole; the wisdom of Wendell Berry's "In Distrust of Movements," where holism takes precedence over labels in saving the planet; and the lyrical sadness of Cheryl Strayed's "Heroin/e," a bitingly honest memoir on parent loss and addiction.

There was merit in even my two least favorite essays, Andrew Sullivan's philosophizing on "What's So Bad About Hate?" (which notes that "A free country will always be a hateful country"); and Steven Weinberg's anti-theist "A Designer Universe?" (which notes that "[it takes religion] for good people to do evil."

I am unfamiliar with Alan Lightman's writing, and his introduction about a Millennium party did not move me; however, I applaud his taste in essays. This is a memorable addition to an already excellent series.

Each of the twenty-one selections included in this volume was originally published in 1999. As such, this collection (together with its list of other notable essays) is perhaps representative of the spectrum of American thinking at the end of the millennium. This collection is worth reading for that reason alone.

These essays soar! For a day I lost myself in this collection. "The qualities I treasure most about these essays," Editor Alan Lightman writes in his Introduction, "are their authenticity and life . . . What I can say is that I liked all these essays a great deal, they made me think, they got under my skin, they took me on journeys, they made me feel alive" (pp. xvii-xviii).

We visit Paris, Rome and New York in these pieces. In the first essay of the collection, Andre Aciman revisits his "romance" (p. 1) with Paris, the "sunlight, faces, foods, places, emotions" of the Paris in his mind (p. 7). "This was not just the center of the world, or even the center of my life," he writes, "it was me" (p. 4). In her essay, Mary Gordon remembers after "wandering and musing"(p. 75) through Rome "as a stranger, a dumb cluck of a tourist, a naive and starstruck lover" (p. 77), she discovered her own meaningful place in that city. Cynthia Ozick takes us to New York, ever "populous, evolving, faithfully inconstant, magnetic, man-made, unnatural--the synthetic sublime" (p. 110).

Despite his distrust for movements, Wendell Berry writes about "the possibility of renewing human respect for the earth and all the good, useful, and beautiful things that come from it" (p. 18) through the "good use" of the "world's goods as they are given to us" (p. 19). In his contribution, "Earth's Eye," Edward Hoagland writes, "I need my months each year without electricity and a telephone, living by the sun and looking down the hill a hundred times a day at the little pond" (p. 84). In a world where everything "feels upside down these days, created for our entertainment," where the natural world "is becoming invisible, appearing only as a backdrop for our own human dramas and catastrophes," (p. 217) we find Terry Tempest Williams confronting sharks at the Monterey Sea Aquarium, American Museum of Natural History, and Brooklyn Museum of Art, while contemplating wilderness as "an aesthetic," as "conceptual art."

"My father is the window. I am the wasp" (p. 46). In his poignant essay, "A Son in the Shadow," Fred D'Aguiar struggles "by rumination, contemplation, conjecture, supposition" to "fill the gaps, try to piece together" (p. 41) the father he never knew. In her essay, "Westbury Court," Edwidge Danticat recalls her childhood "too consumed in the intricate plot" of a television soap opera, too "wrapped up in the made-up drama of the world" (p. 49), to rescue neighbor children from a fire.

Lightman's selections will not disappoint you, and it is likely that you will want to tell others about these truly engaging essays.

G. Merritt

Essays are a bit like wine: the amount of material consumed is small, the taste can be extraordinarily intense, and the effect often lingers long afterwards. Essays can be bubbly and bright, like Champagne, or dark and moody like a Shiraz. An anthology like this book is something of a wine tasting, prepared by an experienced sommolier.

Alan Lightman, the editor of this year's volume, is apparently one who practices what he preaches, beginning his introduction with a lively essay about his family's Year 2000 new year's eve celebration. Just as I was thinking to myself that it was as if I had actually attended that party, he abruptly ends that story to explain the philosophy of choice that guided him in selecting the 21 essays appearing in this book, writing "The qualities I treasure most about these essays are their authenticity and life. In reading an essay, I want to feel that I'm communing with a real person..."

I doubt if anyone will find the taste of each of these essays immediately pleasing. Is it the point of such a sampling to be consistently pleasurable to every reader? I think not. Lightman has carefully chosen for his readers a wide selection of wines, including multiple varieties from several regions, and I had not tasted all of these wines before. Some were exquisite to me, evoking memories that I had not visited for many years, but not all were necessarily pleasing to my palate. Yet each is a sophisticated wine, with complex aftertastes; well-crafted by experienced vintners. You will never know what you like if you don't try new things.

Perhaps some potential readers would appreciate a few more practical details about the content of the book. There are several common themes woven through this collection. Three of the essays deal with the subject of travel--specifically with the cities of New York, Paris, and Rome. The subject of death and chronic medical problems appears several times, as does the related subject of family and its influence on the outlook of the essayists. I found two of the early essays comfortably curmudgeonly, addressing the subjects of misplaced victimhood and single-issue politics. An essay on the nature of hate by Andrew Sullivan resonated with ideas that I've been wrestling with for years. Singer's solution to world poverty should be disturbing to the conscience of just about any reader. Although several of the writers deal with spiritual themes, from my Christian perspective, the religious sentiments are somewhat superficial.

This is a diverse group of well-written essays, chosen as much for their ability to stimulate as for their reading pleasure. A desire to agree with the agendas of each author before reading would miss the point of such book.

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