Your Humble Blogger has already mentioned The Best American Essays 2003, which I have now finished. It’s hard to do a report on two dozen essays, most of which have tremendous strengths and flaws.
Was the shortest essay the best? Yes, but as good as “Researchers Say” was, it wasn’t the funniest Ian Frazier I’ve read (I love “Coyote v. Acme”, and another which I’ve read at story reading but whose title I can’t recall, but my new favorite is “The End of Bob’s Bob House”). What about the second shortest? Was it second best? “Yes”, by Brian Doyle (“...in English I whistle, just so, but in Gailic ligim fead, I let a whistle, or taim ag feadail, I am at whistling”), although I’m gratuitously shoving it into second ahead of Adam Gopnik’s “Bumping into Mr. Ravioli” (“The most peculiarly [Manhattan] thing about [three-year-old] Olivia’s imaginary playmate is this: he is always too busy to play with her”). Fourth best, I guess, would be “The Habit”, by Francis Spufford, which describes her experience of reading in terms very similar to mine (“I still go into bookshops when things go wrong”). Fifth may well be Elaine Scarry’s “Citizenship in an Emergency”, but then much of the detail it goes into on the actual events on September, 11, 2001 were in fact new to me, as I honestly paid very little attention at the time.
What about the longest essay? Was that the worst? No, the longest essay was the bizarrely mechanistic Susan Sontag piece “Looking at War”, which was only the second-worst. My least favorite was “Circus Music”, poorly and repetitively written by Edward Hoagland despite Harper’s presumably superior editors. Third least would be close between Ben Matcalf’s mean-spirited mockery of Sacajawea (and not-so-incidental ridicule of federal employees) called “Wooden Dollar” and Cheryl Strayed (if that is her real name) describing her reacting to her mother’s death by cheating on her husband, over and over, with people she dislikes, in “The Love of my Life”, going on to describe her divorce, her heroin addiction, her abortion, and her refusal to redeem herself or her story in an essay for our edification. Gosh, thanks, both of you. If I had to pick one more for the least-favorite list, it would be an interesting, well-written piece called “The Learning Curve” by Atul Gawande, which contains lengthy descriptions of medical procedures going wrong. Ick. Oh, ooh, ow, oh, I’m not reading any more of this essay. Not that it’s a bad essay, you understand, but I have this Thing about needles.
The rest of the essays have good bits and bad bits, memorable stretches, interesting information, annoying lapses, marvelous turns of phrase, strangely disruptive pontifications, lovely images, and a whole variety of stuff. On the whole, I’m glad I read it, but if I didn’t read another book like it until next year’s edition, I don’t think I’d be too upset.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.