Amazon.com Review
The essay is having something of a renaissance these days, and to celebrate we have the 1998
Anchor Essay Annual. In his introduction, Phillip Lopate writes, "It is certainly unarguable that aspects of the personal essay have begun to bleed into other, more traditionally impersonal, essay types.... What is less noticeable, perhaps, is that the influence has also gone the other way: our personal essayists are groping more and more to incorporate other-than-personal subject matter--that is, to address disciplines and arguments that take them beyond the narrowness of self." To prove his point, Lopate has included pieces of every persuasion, from the personal to the formal and all the variations in between. There is, for example, Vivian Gornick's "The Princess and the Pea," a meditation on unfulfilled longing. "I was born to find the wrong man," she writes. "Not finding him was the defining experience. It is the same with the princess and the pea. She's not after the prince, she's after the pea." At the opposite end of the spectrum is Gilles Deleuze's scholarly deconstruction of Melville's
Bartleby the Scrivener: "
Bartleby is neither a metaphor for the writer nor the symbol of anything whatsoever. It is a violently comical text, and the comical is always literal."
Lopate truly has included something for everyone. Topics range from the intensely personal (William Maxwell's "Nearing 90") to the political (Norman Podhoretz's "Lolita, My Mother-in-Law, the Marquis de Sade, and Larry Flynt") to the macabre (Francine Prose's "The Old Morgue"). The 29 essays contained in this volume are truly the cream of the crop, shining examples of the form in all its permutations. This is a perfect book for readers with inquiring minds and voracious appetites for variety; reading The Anchor Essay Annual is like dining out at a buffet--plenty to sample in bite-size servings. --Margaret Prior
From Kirkus Reviews
With essays by more than 25 writers from around the world, this collection presents a diverse and usually engaging, arguably comprehensive cross-section of some of today - s best nonfiction. Since their perfection by Montaigne, essays have gone through any number of peaks and sloughs of popularity. Now they are such the rage that creative writing programs are rushing to offer essay MFAs. As surely as any tulip craze, it - s a bubble, one that is responsible for most of the least successful essays here, with their pointless autobiographizing, tedious solipsism, and strained preciousness. Fortunately, given the size and breadth and general quality of this collection, these few clunkers can be quickly and almost harmlessly skipped over. Overall, Lopate (Portrait of My Body, 1996, etc.), in his second stint as editor of this collection, has done a signal job of amassing and arranging a number of challenging, revealing, even startling essays - although, with contributions from such notables as David Foster Wallace, Luc Sante, Edward Said, and Francine Prose, it - s hard to go too far wrong. Topics range across the full spectrum of the comdie humaine, from birth to divorce to death and everything in between. Yet there is a charming quirkiness to many of the selections, a necessary unnecessariness that reveals more than a more conventional, straightforward essay might. For example, there is Edward Hoagland on his encounters with wild animals, Margaret Talbot on '50s pin-up legend Bettie Page, Emily Fox Gordon on being a faculty wife. Lopate has managed to put in something for everybody without most of the dumbing down and leaden compromises such a popularist enterprise usually requires. Like a box of chocolates, full of surprises - and usually good ones: A few more collections of this caliber, and Anchor might just have an institution on its hands. --
Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
