The Best American Essays 1990
Edited by Justin Kaplan
Ticknor & Fields, 308 pages, $19.95, $9.95 paper
Let me admit right away that as an insatiable magazine reader I find few anthologies more enjoyable than ”The Best American Essays” series. Here, preserved between hard covers, is a second chance to catch up with all those interesting-looking pieces I didn`t get to the first time around. All that`s missing is the guilty bliss of keeping company with a stack of last month`s magazines.
As with any magazine, though, there is a sense that however brilliant or irritating the pieces themselves, they are only the chosen guests at a party shaped by a particular editor`s sensibility. What`s especially interesting is that since the inception of the ”Best Essays” series in 1986, each year`s guest editor has had a slightly different notion not only of what constitutes a given year`s ”best” but also of how to define the essay itself.
Thus, ”The Best American Essays of 1990,” edited by the noted biographer Justin Kaplan, decidedly favors reportage over confession, analysis and argument over gut-wrenching emotion. To be sure, both passion and personal experience have their place here; four separate essays recount struggles with illness and the shadow of death. Yet even these essays are placed within a larger social context. ”That we see so many distinctive pieces-sardonic, unflinching, even celebratory in a somber and grateful way-on this one topic,” Kaplan writes in his introduction, ”may well be the flip side of our national obsession with fitness, diet, and condition.”
My personal favorite among this year`s selections is Joseph Epstein`s drolly disarming ”A Few Kind Words for Envy,” which originally appeared in the magazine that Epstein edits, The American Scholar. Epstein`s light touch yields such gems as this: ”Issac Stern is famously generous to young musicians, but is he, I wonder, sound on the subject of Jascha Heifitz? At a dinner party in heaven I think it probably a good idea not to invite, on the same evening, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Tolstoy; nor would I recommend seating Leonardo and Michelangelo next to each other.”
A close second goes to Ursula K. Le Guin`s ”The Fisherwoman`s Daughter,” a critical examination of the peculiar notion that, where women are concerned, writing novels and raising families do not mix. Le Guin`s essay (a shorter version of which originally appeared in The New York Times Book Review) is angry and eloquent: ”This refusal to allow both creation and procreation to women is cruelly wasteful: not only has it impoverished our literature by banning the housewives, but it has caused unbearable personal pain and self-mutilation: Woolf obeying the wise doctors who said she must not bear child; Plath who put glasses of milk by her kids` beds and then put her head in the oven.”
It is especially illuminating to read Le Guin in conjunction with two other first-rate selections dealing with diverse cultural notions of creation and creativity, ”The Paradoxes of Creativity” by Jacques Barzun (from The American Scholar) and Stephen Jay Gould`s ”The Creation Myths of
Cooperstown” (from Natural History).
In terms of sheer visceral power, the collection`s most striking essay is Natalie Kusz`s account of a childhood marred by cataclysmic injury, ”Vital Signs” (first published in The Threepenny Review). Only 7 when an attacking husky dog nearly killed her, Kusz miraculously survived to tell the tale.
”Certainly I suffered pain, and I knew early a debilitating fear of surgery itself,” she writes, ”but the life I measured as months inside and months outside the walls was a good one, and bred in me understandings that I would not relinquish now.”
In a somewhat similar vein, the late literary critic Anatole Broyard regards his diagnosis of terminal cancer with hope and desire rather than despair in ”Intoxication by My Illness” (from The New York Times Magazine): ”As I look ahead, I feel like a man who has awakened from a long afternoon nap to find the evening stretched before him.”
By contrast, in ”Talking AIDS to Death” (from Esquire), reporter Randy Shilts, surveying the wreckage left amongst his friends by the epidemic, is filled with anger and gloom: ”The bitter irony is, my role as an AIDS celebrity just gives me a more elevated promontory from which to watch the world make the same mistakes in the handling of the AIDS epidemic that I had hoped my work would help to change.”
The award for the most talked about literary essay of the year surely goes to Tom Wolfe`s fascinating, if self-serving, look at recent American fiction, ”Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” (from Harper`s). Rather than taking seriously Wolfe`s dismissal of a whole generation of writers, I suggest that we read his ode to realism as an entertaining account of how he came to write ”The Bonfire of the Vanities.”
Other highlights include Sue Hubbell`s whimsical quest for Elvis impersonators in ”The Vicksburg Ghost” (from The New Yorker); Alan Dershowitz`s ”Shouting Fire” (from The Atlantic), a provocative
reexamination of Oliver Wendell Holmes` most famous legal pronouncement; and Michael Arlen`s grim travelogue of earthquake-stricken Armenia, ”Armenian Journal” (from The Nation).
On the other hand, Ann Hodgman`s macabre taste-test of various dog foods-”No Wonder They Call Me a Bitch” (from Spy)-is unappetizing in more ways than one. And I wish Stanley Elkin had found a better use for his extraordinary literary fireworks than demolishing the Oscars in ”At the Academy Awards” (from Harper`s).
I also believe that if Stuart Klawans in ”The Corps in the Mirror: The Warhol Wake” (from Grand Street) and Joy Williams in ”Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp” (from Esquire) had done some judicious cutting, their righteous anger, directed respectively against blatant commercialism in the art world and our woeful record on ecology, would have come across with much more power. Still, ”The Best American Essays 1990” ranks as one of the most diverting volumes between book or magazine covers this year-and you don`t have to worry about back copies piling up in your living room.
