Customer Reviews

The Best American Essays 2006

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

If you're expecting the usual batch of essays this year, be warned.

The guest editor gig to the Best American series seems like a pretty cushy one. The series editor selects about a hundred essays from the hundreds that are submitted throughout the past year and the guest editor picks twenty five of those and maybe slips in one or two favorites of his or her own. You really can't go wrong no matter which twenty-five you pick. And until now, I didn't really think it was possible to put your own stamp on a collection as guest editor.

Lauren Slater has truly accomplished that. Although I recognized Slater's name from having read her controversial and slightly creepy book of a few years ago, Opening Skinner's Box, I jumped into the essays without expecting much different form the usual batch of high quality writing. Since the essays are arranged in alphabetical order by author's name, the book starts off with a death-free article about the Kinsey Institute. It's followed by a sad account of an addict, an edgy discussion of racial epithets, and a story of grief. A typically cantankerous tirade about celebrity by Joseph Epstein provides a break in the slide toward depression. Maudlin thoughts on aging and dying follow, then Adam Gopnik's tale of the death of his daughter's beloved pet. A mother's death, a dysfunctional relationship in Spain, then a bit more relief from Susan Orlean. Somewhat refreshed, we dive back in to find a dying dog, a family's shame, Susan Sontag's son on his mother's final illness, and Oliver Sacks with a relatively upbeat essay of a woman who loses her speech in a stroke-like attack and over several years with the best medical care and devoted attention of her two grown daughters, manages to learn to communicate again.

Next an understandably bitter account of spending decades regaining the use of a hand after an encounter with a vicious dog, and then the best essay in the book. Alan Shapiro's Why Write is thoughtful, humorous, and made me think about writing in a whole new light. Instead of treating writing as a form of communication (which it certainly can be), he thinks of it more as singing or as a sport, something you do for yourself, and may also be pleasing to others, but only incidentally.

The collection winds down with a piece on a grief support group, an interesting account of Scott Turow's relationship with Saul Bellow, and finally the sad story by Marjorie Williams of her fatal cancer.

Don't be fooled by the cheerful green cover of this year's collection. It's a dark and disturbing collection.

One would expect that a collection of essays that aspires to contain America's best would be like an abstract mosaic: a grouping of differently colored and sized pieces with no easily discernible overall theme, just very subtle ones related to the quality of the art and whatever happens to be prominent in the national consciousness that year. Some of the pieces would be dark, some would be brightly colored; some jagged, others smooth.

The format of The Best American series is to have a guest editor (in this case Lauren Slater, author of "Prozac Diary") make the final choice for the pieces included in each volume. The guest editor thus has considerable power to shape the volume to their liking. A few guest editors (I've read this series for years) appear to aspire to uphold the series claim to be a collection of the best of that year's writing. More often, as is the case with Slater's selections here, the guest editor appears to put their strong personal stamp on the volume, selecting works that appeal to the guest editor's particular biases, which might be biases of subject matter, theme, tone, or (less often, thankfully) politics.

The essays Slater selected are nearly all well-written, powerful, and moving. However, they are almost entirely dark in tone, and their subject matter often focuses on personal tragedies that have happened to the authors. Here are some opening sentences (or near opening sentences) to provide a flavor of what the reader of this volume must consume: "Outside of a psychotic who attacked me a few months ago...", "I don't seem to suffer the pains of anguish that many women whose mothers have died feel...", "When our five-year-old daughter Olivia's goldfish, Blueie, died the other week...", "I woke to a downpour the March morning in 1989 when I had to identify my mother's body at the New York City morgue...", "It was the beginning of what would turn out to be a very bad day...", "This summer I had to put my dog George to sleep...", "Even during the last nine months of her life...", "In 1989, however, Pat's husband died suddenly of a heart attack...", "The dog that mauled me...", "In the elevator going down from the seventeenth floor, everyone is crying...", "The beast first showed its face benignly...".

I almost gave this volume five stars for the quality of the essays, but I decided to deduct a star due to the dark tone of nearly all the selections. What other essays, more positive in tone and outlook, were available to Slater but didn't make it into this volume?

This collection of essays starts out innocuously enough with Laurie Abraham's "Kinsey and Me," but the tone of the whole becomes almost relentlessly depressing. I dispute the Booklist's characterization of these essays as "vivifying." The emphasis on the topic of death has the direct opposite effect on the reader, despite the obligatory epiphanies that close some of these essays. A few of them, such as Joseph Epstein's ruminations on celebrity and Alan Shapiro's explanatory essay "Why Write?," offer the mix of intelligence, information, and insight that one expects from this annual collection.

Were there no available superlative essays on political themes or philosophical pieces that didn't deal with death, disfigurement, or despair? The last thing that I wish to read at my age is another thoughtfully glum assessment of what happens when you grow old and people (or your favorite animals) start dying. So, be warned. If this kind of fashionable desolation is your cup of tea, then by all means have at it. Otherwise, may I recommend the Best American Science and Nature Writing?

The "Best of" series is usually a great collection and I look forward to not just the essay volume, but several different editions each year. The thing I like is the unique cross-section of timely pieces provided by the guest editors. And in almost every one of the dozens of "Best of" editions I've read that's what's provided--a cross section.

Not so with Lauren Slater's edition of the Best American Essays. Here we get 8 or 9 articles about dead or dying parents as well as some lighter fare in the 3 essays about dead, dying, or lost pets.

I have nothing against death as a subject, but to provide such a single themed volume is not just depressing, it's completely opposed to the spirit and brand of the "Best American" series. Would an editor of the "Best American Travel Writing" get away with publishing 20 essays on Portugal? Or an editor of the "Best American Sports Writing" publishing 20 essays about the Yankees? It's just not a good representation of the many great essays written in 2006.

I, for one, remember reading lots of great essays about stem cell research, war, the new wave of female university presidents, hurricane Katrina recovery efforts, the mid-term elections, and global warming, to name a few. Where are those topics? Where are any topics other than death?

I advise all loyal readers of this and other "Best of" editions to check the TOC carefully before you buy again.

It's not that there weren't a few good essays, because there was, just no truly great esssays, the kind you want to anthologize forever. At least there were no truly bad essays, but most were mediocre or average. Not what I've come to expect this series.

As a high school AP English teacher, I love this series as an overview of current American prose. This particular year's collection is not my favorite, but it does present an assortment of strong writing styles and an interesting cross-section of American essays from a variety of publications.

If you're looking for relief from daily pain and grief, this volume, which reads like a primer on death, may prove hard-going. If so, turn to the essay titled "Relief," by Kim Dana Kupperman. It's worth the price of admission. Here you'll find a nearly pitch-perfect example of the power of detail in constructing a narrative--and the power of reason, reflection, and poetic language to transcend the described events. Kupperman takes us down deep but brings us back up for air in a very satisfying fashion.

If all of these essays were strong, one might not notice that most of them are variatons on the same theme. But only a few sparkle ("A Matter of Life and Death," "The Culture of Celebrity"), and we're left with a book that would be terrific to lend to someone who has a professional interest in illness or bereavement but is not so good for aficianados of the essay. Lauren Slater is an accomplished writer; her narrowness as an editor is a surprise and a disappointment. Try the 1986 collection, or any volume from the early years of the series.

I loved this collection of essays. It covered an interesting range of topics and the voices made great use of the form.

This is an excellent collection of essays from a variety of publications - everything from small literary presses to national magazines like the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly. The subject matter ranges from the death of a pet fish to the agonizing death of an established writer from cancer. Every single essay is worth reading.