Title: Best American Essays 1997
Editor: Ian Frazier
Date: 1997
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
ISBN: 0-395-85694-9
Length: 219 pages, plus 6-page list of other outstanding essays
Quote: "An essay is a person talking...Wandering is acceptable in an essay."
If Ian Frazier had been writing for the blogosphere, he might have said: Essays are what blog posts want to be when they grow up. Both forms start with something, anything, the writer wants to tell people something about: a flower, a news item, a departed relative, a slang word, an odd scrap of history. From there, a blog post grows into a quick thought splashed up on the writer's web site, where clunky formatting-for-the-screen contributes to its casual, even raffish effect. Blog posts can't always aspire to the title even of writing practice; often their sole purpose is to tell friends, "Yes, I'm alive, still at a school or office or other place that has a computer center, clicking and clattering on."
Essays, on the other hand, have been polished for printing in a respectable magazine where they receive the psychological benefits of justified margins and indented paragraphs and, best of all, that solid, unblinking, electronic-free form, equally accessible wherever there is light. That alone would make essays a better experience for the reader, even if they weren't well enough written to deserve it...and many of them are. Where blogs offer immediacy, connection, the chance for the reader's comments to shape a blog post into a future essay, essays offer completeness and authority.
All of the essays gathered in each volume of the Best American Essays collection are well written. All are, additionally, evergreen; topics and references remind us when they were originally written, and some of them were written as news, but if they're collected here they've been transferred from the category of "news" to the category of "history." In this 1997 collection, Debra Dickerson's New Republic essay describes the aftermath of a 1995 assault; Frank Gannon's Harper's essay describes a game children used to play, inspired by a short-lived TV series in 1966; Cynthia Ozick's New Yorker essay describes the store her parents kept in the 1930s; Gay Talese's Esquire essay observes the formal meeting of Muhammad Ali and Fidel Castro in 1996. The understanding was that all of these essays would be read after the writers' lifetime, that each would become a piece in future readers' mental mosaic of times past.
Best American Essays have a first person, but this first person is not always the subject; in some years--not this one--the subjects of some essays were historical studies. Many Best American Essays are character studies, often of writers' elderly or departed relatives; this volume contains "Notes on My Mother" and "My Father," as well as the family business story ("Drugstore Eden") and "Dinner at Uncle Boris's," and most of the other essays contain traces of family-story too.
Best American Essays are for adults, in the good way. They're not obscene; most aren't too violent or explicit for children to see; a precocious reader might, at six or twelve or eighteen, enjoy the anecdotes scattered through the pages. They are for literate people, reasonably well informed on a variety of topics or willing to become so, with at least the equivalent of a good high school education, a fair bit of life experience, and a longer attention span than the commercial media expect their audience to have. A full range of ages and generations are represented but--I say this as one who discovered the Best American Essays around age thirty and has kept several volumes around the house since--even for adults, these tend to be books to grow into. Or: if you keep them around for ten years or longer, then reread them, you'll still enjoy them, because on second, third, fourth readings, when the ones that made the most vivid impression on the first reading seem a bit familiar, you'll be better prepared to appreciate the ones that didn't grab your attention the first time.
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