Book Review: The Prose Reader

Title: The Prose Reader

Author: Kim & Michael Flachmann

Publisher: Prentice-Hall

Date: 1999

ISBN: 0-13-095406-3

Length: 688 pages

Quote: “The essays in the Prose Reader continue to represent a wide range of topics.”

That’s what’s not to like about this book. Compared with other essay collections, it’s both thin and tinny. In a frantic effort to be “inclusive” the editors have weighed this book down with essays more than half of which are about the Politics of Identity. Though it would not have been possible for any collection of essays in the 1990s to have any credibility if it didn’t include any of Shelby Steele’s, and thus the essays about the Politics of Identity don’t all add up to “Feel guilty about people like me and throw money at us, which, of course, will make it very hard for you to like or respect any of us, but we don’t care because we only want your money.” But they come close. This book is p.c. to the point of pain.

That still leaves room for some good essays. A few were even written before p.c.-ism had fettered the Muses in America. There’s an essay by Ray Bradbury on putting up a front-porch swing, one by Russell Baker about being a “news boy,” Jessica Mitford’s exposé about the mortuary business, Judith Viorst’s plausible (but wrong) defense of “little white lies,” and Annie Dillard’s reflections on meeting a weasel in the woods. There is, of course, the “controversial” piece in which Shelby Steele dares once again to admit that many Black Americans have earned their own money, and would rather be respected, and perhaps even liked, than have guilt money pushed at them.

Then there’s page after page after page of recent p.c. drivel, and any college student who can find The Best American Essays in the school library will know just how many better essays were not included in this book in order to make sure they were exposed to the arguments for censorship and all the literary grandchildren of Countee Cullen who narrate one personal story and set it up as a plea on behalf of a demographic group. Cullen’s poem (another little kid called him a racist name, and “I saw the town of Baltimore from June until September; Of all the time that I was there, that’s all that I remember”) was terse and memorable, even if some critics found it whiny, but now efforts to be “inclusive” are filling libraries and school textbooks with imitations of it in prose, and some of them would be long even if there weren’t so many of them.

I’ll say this as a woman. Though not a minority group in real life, we’ve been artificially treated like one in the professions, oppressed as badly as any and more than some. The documents of our struggle ought to be in every public library, as well as the academic ones. We ought to remember the names of our activist foremothers, and, whether or not we agree with them on all points, appreciate their contribution to whatever success we’ve enjoyed. (And it behooves all humans who feel in any way discriminated against to read the history of the early Christian Church and the history of the Black American civil rights movement.) But a person whose best, most interesting statement is a statement to the effect that person belongs to a demographic group—are you serious?—is by definition an uninteresting person.

Women writers have had some advantages other “outsider” writers might not have had, in getting our work recognized at all. One reflection of our success is the fact that the Flachmanns’ selection of exemplary essays by women includes more essays about something other than “I Am A [insert demographic group]: This Is How You Are Supposed To Feel About Me” than their selections of exemplary essays from any other demographic. Three! Count them! Three whole essays about things women have learned and thought about something beyond themselves! Hurrah for us!

Except that, actually, people from other demographic groups have written well about topics beyond themselves, and the Flachmanns just haven’t bothered to discover their essays. Which says something about them, I’m sorry to say. When you are doing a computer search for “best essays by [demographic group] authors” you’re likely to find more of the “me-me-me-and-my-demographic-identity” than of the essays people actually write for their own demographic group. Arguably it may be asking too much of college students to expect them to read the nonfiction People Different From The Students write for People Like The Writers. I know I’ve found Wole Soyinka hard to follow; I’ve enjoyed Salman Rushdie partly because I had special help with his cultural references; I think people who have trouble following Gandhi, Thoreau, or Wendell Berry probably don’t need to be in college, but many of the young have been very poorly prepared... I also know that very few college students find V.S. Naipaul or Anne Morrow Lindbergh, for two, hard to follow; students my age liked Andrei Codrescu and Salman Rushdie, and I’d guess that the young still do; I’d expect most students to enjoy Alfian bin Sa’at’s Malay Sketches. (Not only is Dorothy Sayers still remarkably readable, but I suspect she would have agreed with my point here.) It’s not as if you had to get into studies of doctrinal controversies within minority religious groups and appreciate, e.g., Hyveth Williams' Seventh-Day Adventist apologetics, to find good writing in English by people who are neither White nor male. And actually, if the purpose of a collection is to illustrate good writing techniques, how much difference should it make if the writers were White and male? Francis Bacon and John Bunyan wrote some essays that illustrate good writing techniques better than some of the uninspired recent examples in this collection…

End of rant. Because I’m turned off by the p.c.-ism in this book a person might imagine that I didn’t enjoy reading it. I did, actually. Several of the better essays in this ; collection were old favorites. Some of the ones that were new to me, I enjoyed. It’s just that I’ve read so many essays that were better than…well, let’s pick on Lewis Sawaquat’s contribution to The Prose Reader. It was new to me. It’s not a bad personal essay. I enjoyed reading it. Only when I went back to write this review did I find myself thinking “…and what is this me-me-me-and-my-demographic thing doing in the place where a hard-hitting ecological study by Marilou Awiakta ought to be?”

If you are a serious student or teacher of nonfiction writing, what this book has to offer that A Rhetoric of Argument, the Norton Anthologies, and the Best American Essays haven’t done better is the analyses of writing techniques. You probably know that personal essays are generally rated lower than the impersonal kind. You probably don’t care; personal essays tend to be fun reads. If a step- by-step analysis of how a personal essay is put together works for you, get this book. I would not recommend that teachers use it as the primary textbook all students are required to buy. I’d recommend that teachers keep it in the library for all students to read.

Oh, wottha...I'm known for brutal honesty, so I'll say it outright. You want to compile a really inclusive anthology of writing from different demographic groups, you have to read a lot of different writings, not just Google "essays by X kind of writers." I don't think the Flachmanns did their homework before they published this book.

Today's music link: Comes highly recommended by young correspondents. It is the duty of the old to try to keep up with the major trends in pop culture, although we're probably not meant to get into them. I can't say this song converted me to fanatic fandom but I do think the young singer has a good voice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMeVxTPmTDY .