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Title: The Best American Essays 2005 (The Best American Series)
ISBN: 0618357130
Author:
Publicate Date: 2005-10-05
Publish: 2005-10-05
List Price: $14.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $1.75
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1: weakest one yet
I read this series every year, and usually love it, but this edition is rather weak, and I'm surprised, I like and respect Susan Orlean's work, and I would have thought that she would pick better essays. Alas, it isn't so. There are no essays that are truly, truly exceptional. Some are quite good, like Franzen (no surprise there), Kitty Burns Florey, Danielle Ofri (again no surprise), and Shine. Most fall in the blah category. You could take them or leave them. They aren't bad, but they aren't all that good, and definitely should be in this volume. And then there are the clunkers, more than I'm used to seeing in this series (Angell, Barrett, Hoagland, Levy, Masello, States, Ullman, Wallace, and Welker).
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2: 22 satisfying servings of brain food (and 3 duds)
Guest editor Susan Orlean has served up an anthology of essays that emphasizes intelligent, well-written, powerful works that leave an impression long after one finishes reading them. There is a definite New York / Northeast intelligentsia bias in her selections, and for some reason dogs and cooking appear repeatedly as subjects, but aside from these quirks I feel she has performed her job admirably, and created the strongest volume over the past four years of this series (which is how long I've been reading it).
There are more than a few memorable essays in this volume. The most memorable essay is also the most maddening, Mark Greif's "Against Exercise". One hopes that Greif wrote this essay as an intellectual exercise, similar to an assignment in a debating society in which one has to create winning arguments for a position that is directly opposite one's own beliefs. Greif's essay is entirely one-sided, and he does an incredible smear job against a practice (exercise) that would certainly benefit the country as a whole if more Americans did it regularly. I was almost compelled to write a rebuttal, but refrained from doing so on the hope that Greif was just kidding.
Memorable, well-written essays that were enjoyable as opposed to maddening included:
-- Roger Angell's "La Vie en Rose": a beautiful reminiscence of the author's taste of "the good life" among the elite in post-war Europe.
-- Paul Crenshaw's "Storm Country": a powerful first-person account of what it is like to live in Tornado Alley in Arkansas.
-- Jonathan Lethem's "Speak Hoyt-Schemerhorn": an engaging essay about, of all things, a subway station in Brooklyn, whose history mirrors the changing times of the city and society.
-- Oliver Sacks' "Speed": a detailed account of the nature of speed and time, and how it is perceived differently by different people, plants and animals.
-- David Foster Wallace's "Consider the Lobster": an account of the Maine Lobster festival that turns into an exposition of the author's moral struggles with consuming lobsters and meat.
The three duds, and the reasons I feel they are duds, are:
-- Michael Martone's "Contributor's Note": other authors may identify with Martone's neurosis, but this short essay is inconsequential and forgettable.
-- David Masello's "My Friend Lodovico": very narcissistic, although instead of staring into a mirror, the author stares into a painted portrait.
-- Sam Pickering's "Dog Days": self-indulgent navel gazing by an opinionated know-it-all.
Others will no doubt have a different list of hits and misses, but the 2005 Best American Essays contains much to nourish the mind.
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3: Wonderful Essays!
Perfect book for vacation reading or for introducing others to what an essay can be. Wide variety of essay styles, and none of them call attention to themselves as actually being "essays."
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4: Too journalistic
Robert Atwan is an absolutely marvelous editor of this series. But the guest editors, lately, are not literary enough--or rather their choices aren't. When you reread essays selected by Elizabeth Hardwick ('86) or Cynthia Ozick ('98), they hold up beautifully. I'm not sure Orlean's pieces are as timeless. It must be hard, after all these years, to keep finding distinguished new guest editors, so I certainly can't blame Atwan for turning to glossy article writers.
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5: Indigestible mixture
I sympathize with the worthy aims of this compilation. It would be shame for such magnificent pieces of writing to remain ephemeral, never to be aired outside the pages of magazines. Yet the mixture is indigestible. I found it hard to read it through and shift my moods. It was like eating through a buffet table. Probably reading through it is the wrong way to do it. You should browse and pick on one that interests you, but that's exactly what you do at the newsstand or thumbing through a magazine, and that's where I'm afraid these belong. Two of the best essays for me were the Foreword and Introduction by Susan Orlean and Robert Atwan,which discuss the place of the essay in modern literature. The reason the they were the best was because they caught and held me at the moment where I was deciding whether to read a book of essays. That's the point I'm trying to make. Maybe I'll come back to David Foster Wallace's essay next time I'm deciding whether to eat lobster or to Paul Crenshaw's next time there's a tornado warning.
Meanwhile I'll keep up my subscriptions to the New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Asimov's and Antioch Review and pick up the Atlantic and New Yorker at Penn Station and I'll feel I've done my duty by the essay.
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