Book Review: The Best American Essays 1997

A Fair Trade Book

(Amazon has annoyed me lately, but it made me laugh with the computer-generated note that "There is a newer edition of this book: The Best American Essays 1998." Wrong, computer! Each year's Best American Essays collection contains fresh new essays selected by a different writer.)

Title: The Best American Essays 1997

Editor: Ian Frazier

Date: 1997

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

ISBN: 0-395-85694-9

Length: 226 pages

Quote: “Like other activities I enjoy, writing essays is something I would rather do than talk about...I recently learned, however, that for decades now I have been mispronouncing the name ‘Montaigne.’ Though the correct pronunciation has since been explained to me, I am still rather hazy on it. It’s not like ‘champagne’—or not like the way I pronounce ‘champagne.’ This discovery has chastened me, and caused me to shelve the whole history-of-the-essay opening, due to lack of qualifications. I will add that I am glad to have worked Montaigne in so early, and gotten him out of the way.”

Ian Frazier, whose first books were collections of comic essays, goes on to say that he liked some of the essays reprinted in this book because they were funny, others because “what’s funny about them coincides exactly with what’s sad,” and others that were angry or painful but had “a strong intention elegantly followed through” so that, he felt, “The reader finishes each in a heightened and lively frame of mind.”

Do even booksellers review The Best American Essays collections, or do we announce them? I’ll say this: I prefer short nonfiction, with a personal quality but with something in it beyond me-me-me—which is to say, essays—to short fiction. I’m more likely to look for writers’ full-length books after reading their essays than after reading their short stories. I think the public library system made a great mistake by discarding and discontinuing this series.

The Best American Essays are adult books, in the best sense: books that engage an educated adult’s brain in the pleasure of learning something new. Their reading level is above the ninth grade level mandated for “family” newspapers (the ones that don’t hold writers down to a sixth grade level); they don’t explain every joke or reference; the writers often relish obscure words; they expect you to recognize Frazier’s remarks on Montaigne as funny because you’ve read at least translations of at least a few of Montaigne’s Essais. They’re dense with information packed into small print, not broken up by graphics, text boxes, or other visual clutter. They expect readers to be people who enjoy reading and learning. They’ve disappeared from the public libraries, not because they didn’t circulate, but because stupid people don’t like the idea that people who are not stupid enjoy reading and learning.

The essays are always presented in alphabetical order; in 1997 the writers of Ian Frazier’s choice were Hilton Als, Jo Ann Beard, Roy Blount, Bernard Cooper, Louis de Bernières, Debra Dickerson, Richard Ford, Frank Gannon, Dagoberto Gilb, Verlyn Klinkenborg, Natalie Kusz, Naton Leslie, Thomas McGuane, Cullen Murphy, Cynthia Ozick, Lukie Chapman Reilly, Luc Sante, Paul Sheehan, Charles Simic, Lauren Slater, Susan Sontag, Gay Talese, Le Thi Diem Thuy, and Joy Williams.

I think Als’ essay is the weakest, a story supposedly about his mother but really about a sexual fantasy that probably appeals to nobody but him, but even it has some felicitous phrases. Dickerson’s lament for a wounded nephew is the most painful to read. Talese’s report on the late-in-life meeting of Muhammad Ali and Fidel Castro is the least funny; Roy Blount’s thoughts on being a Southern writer are the funniest. Joy Williams’ consideration of overpopulation, “Against Babies,” is the most outrageous. Your reactions may vary.

What can you learn from a book published in 1997 about what people, many of whom were old at the time, were thinking? (Most of these essays are not about news stories from 1997; some are mostly about historical events that occurred even earlier than 1897.) You can learn that history, science, literature, philosophy, and art haven’t changed at all. These essays were collected for the pleasure each one gave the reader, and, by and large, they still do. Reading them is like a leisurely lunch with each of twenty-some interesting people, old and young, male and female, American and foreign. The stories they tell are about times and places where you’ve not been and, in some cases, they’ve not been either (many essays are about historical research). I may be oldfashioned but I think this by itself is enough to make the Best American Essays valuable: They give readers, some of whom may be the type of person who is not really boring so much as just very young, a sense of how much of a world there is out beyond the end of your nose, how much more there is to think about than me-me-me-and-my-little-feelings. If you happen to be interested in Slater’s best-case experience of Prozac Dementia (she knew pseudomemories might form, and was able to watch them like a movie) or Sante’s discussion of European food or Thuy’s description of twentieth century Vietnam, so much the better; if you’re not, particularly, well, you’ve not lost much time and they are interesting people.

Ian Frazier is still alive and writing, so this is A Fair Trade Book: When you buy it here, $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment, we'll send $1 to Ian Frazier or a charity of his choice. Three more books of this size can nestle beside The Best American Essays 1997 in a package, and if you happened to choose Frazier's early books, Coyote v. Acme, Nobody Better, and Great Plains, Frazier or his charity would get $4.