{"id":153845,"date":"2021-08-03T12:14:17","date_gmt":"2021-08-03T16:14:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=153845"},"modified":"2021-08-03T12:14:17","modified_gmt":"2021-08-03T16:14:17","slug":"the-silver-age-of-essays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/08\/03\/the-silver-age-of-essays\/","title":{"rendered":"The Silver Age of Essays"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new essay anthology, <\/em>The Contemporary American Essay<\/a>, collects works by forty-seven American writers that exemplify the diverse styles and subject matters explored within the form throughout the past twenty-five years. In the excerpted introduction below, the editor and writer Phillip Lopate considers the boom of literary nonfiction amid times of uncertainty.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Henriette Browne, A Girl Writing; The Pet Goldfinch<\/em>, ca. 1874, oil on canvas, 22 x 36 1\/4\u2019\u2019. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

The first quarter of the twenty-first century has been an uneasy time of rupture and anxiety, filled with historic challenges and opportunities. In that close to twenty-five-year span, the United States witnessed the ominous opening shot of September 11, followed by the seemingly unending Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the effort to control HIV\/AIDS<\/small>, the 2008 recession, the election of the first African American president, the legalization of same-sex marriage, the contentious reign of Donald Trump, the stepped-up restriction of immigrants, the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, and the coronavirus pandemic, just to name a few major events. Intriguingly, the essay has blossomed during this time, in what many would deem an exceptionally good period for literary nonfiction\u2014if not a golden one, then at least a silver: I think we can agree that there has been a remarkable outpouring of new and older voices responding to this perplexing moment in a form uniquely amenable to the processing of uncertainty.<\/p>\n

When the century began, essays were considered box office poison; editors would sometimes disguise collections of the stuff by packaging them as theme-driven memoirs. All that has changed: a generation of younger readers has embraced the essay form and made their favorite authors into best sellers. We could speculate on the reasons for this growing popularity\u2014the hunger for humane, authentic voices trying to get at least a partial grip on the truth in the face of so much political mendacity and information overload; the convenient, bite-size nature of essays that require no excessive time commitment; the rise of identity politics and its promotion of eloquent spokespersons. Rather than trying to figure out why it\u2019s happening, what\u2019s important is to chart the high points of this resurgence, and to account for the range of styles, subgenres, experimental approaches, and moral positions that characterize the contemporary American essay.<\/p>\n

Of course, roping off a period like the year 2000 to the present and calling it \u201ccontemporary\u201d is somewhat arbitrary, but one has to start somewhere. At least this artificial chronological box allows for the inclusion of older authors who made their mark in the twentieth century and had the temerity to keep producing significant work in the twenty-first (such as John McPhee, Joyce Carol Oates, Barry Lopez, Thomas Lynch). Just as set designers of period films make a mistake in choosing only articles of clothing or furnishings that were produced in that era, forgetting that we always live with the layered material objects of previous decades, so it would be wrong to restrict the literary flavor of an era to writers under forty. Indeed, what makes this period so interesting is the m\u00e9lange of clashing generations and points of view. There are still tightly reasoned sequential essays being written in the classical mode, side by side with ones that resist that tidiness. <\/p>\n

The essay has always been an adaptable, plastic, shape-shifting form: it may take the form of meditation, reportage, blog, humor piece, eulogy, autobiographical slice, diatribe, list, collage, mosaic, lecture, or letter. Contemporary practitioners seem bent on further testing its limits. For instance, Lia Purpura, Eula Biss, and Mary Cappello are drawn to the lyric essay, which stresses the essay\u2019s associational rather than narrative or argumentative properties. Cappello has shrewdly spoken about essay writing\u2014\u201cthat non-genre that allows for untoward movement, apposition, and assemblage, that is one part conundrum, one part accident, and that fosters a taste for discontinuity.\u201d In line with Modernist aesthetics, a mosaic essay with \u201ca taste for discontinuity\u201d may be constructed from fragments, numbered or not, with white space breaks between pieces that connect intuitively or emotionally if not logically. It is up to the reader to figure it out. The list essay, which is highly generative of disparate materials, by its very nature evades an argumentative through line, and can seem initially as random as a poetic inventory by Whitman, though it may deepen subtly and organically. (For example, Nicholson Baker\u2019s charming \u201cOne Summer,\u201d which crisscrosses periods of his life, nevertheless builds to a revealing self-portrait.)<\/p>\n

While the influence of poetic technique on the lyric essay has been largely acknowledged, less recognized is the short story\u2019s impact on the contemporary essay. Many memoir essays exist in a kind of fictive space, progressing through scene and dialogue and a sensory-laden mood that stays tied to the moment by moment. The piece itself may be entirely factual, but the sentences give off a Minimalist frisson that shows the influence of short story writers such as Lydia Davis, Amy Hempel, and Lorrie Moore.<\/p>\n

Nonfiction has been agitated in recent years by certain ethical questions, such as, \u201cHow legitimate is it to insert fictional details in nonfiction?\u201d or \u201cIs it proper to appropriate the voice of some- one of a different ethnicity, sex, or social class?\u201d That both can be done successfully can be seen in Hilton Als\u2019s \u201cI Am the Happiness of This World,\u201d which channels the silent film star Louise Brooks\u2019s ruminations, as though Brooks herself were dictating an essay to Als from the grave.<\/p>\n

The role of technology\u2014the internet and social media\u2014in altering our rhetorical lives may even affect the typography of an essay (as evidenced in Ander Monson\u2019s unshackled \u201cFailure: A Meditation\u201d). \u201cAre we merging with our computers and turning into \u2018spiritual machines\u2019?\u201d wondered the essayist Meghan O\u2019Gieblyn. The blog, once viewed as a debasement or poor relation of the essay, has proven itself a useful invitation to free-flowing, self-surprising displays of consciousness (see Ross Gay, Eileen Myles). Some feminist essayists have expressed a desire to arrive at a \u201cpost-patriarchal essay,\u201d implying that the very structure of linear argumentation is authoritarian and reinforces status quo sexist power relations. (Maggie Nelson\u2019s influential Bluets <\/em>and The Argonauts <\/em>offer clues for shaking up the old model.) Yet all these ways to challenge and subvert the classic essay are in the tradition of the essay itself, whose very name bespeaks an attempt, an experimentation, a stab in the dark. All this is to suggest that the essay remains the most open-ended of forms. (It has even spilled out into other media, as witness the essay film and the graphic essay, subjects for another day.)<\/p>\n

Perhaps nothing has so shaped the contemporary practice of essay writing as the rise of the personal essay. It scarcely matters whether the subject be illness (Floyd Skloot), loitering (Charles D\u2019Ambrosio), or prisons (Joyce Carol Oates): some insertion of authorial character is likely to invade the text. Much the way journalism has increasingly surrendered its claims of objective neutrality and allowed reporters room for subjective voice, so the essay has come to rely more and more on an \u201cI.\u201d With that has come an infusion of raw honesty, vulnerability, and awkward admission such as would scarcely have been seen in earlier essays. Younger essayists are often willing to acknowledge confusion, psychological distress, thralldom to contradictory drives and uncontrollable desires. There is often a trade-off: more heat, urgency, diaristic excitement, less perspective. Younger essayists might struggle to resolve questions about their authentic nature and perplexing disparities, while older essayists might feel more at ease with the self\u2019s mutable, impure, self-betraying nature. Those who are entering middle age will often situate their \u201cI\u201d characters on a moving platform that begins in childhood or adolescence and transitions into adulthood and sometimes even parenthood. The personal essayist can accommodate these chronological shifts between life\u2019s passages more easily than the short story writer (unless you\u2019re Alice Munro). As the essayists age, they are less likely to be writing from the midst of distressed confusion and more from a place of wry self-mockery and detachment. The younger the essayist\u2014not all, of course\u2014the more likely an identification with a generational perspective. Popular culture, rock music, or TV programs may be convenient markers for that shared membership. The sense of being part of a generation tends to fade as one grows older: one sees one\u2019s unshakable limits and singularities, for better or worse.<\/p>\n

It has long been the province of the personal essayist to turn one\u2019s narrator into a character by asserting defining autobiographical facts, eccentric or contrarian notions, odd tastes, behavioral tics, and so on. Having done so, the essayist might then wish to parry that Crusoe-like separateness by analyzing to what extent he or she belongs to a larger group or tribe. Ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, physical or mental disability, national origin, generational awareness, social class, and political alignment are some of the categories increasingly tempting contemporary essayists to situate themselves in the midst of a group or at an ambivalent angle from it. This is especially true when the minority to which you belong is asserting its rights or finds itself under attack\u2014when the question becomes unavoidably topical.<\/p>\n

The hyphenated American often experiences self-division: \u201cOne ever feels his twoness,\u201d in W.\u2009E.\u2009B. Du Bois\u2019s famous formulation. Thoughtful African American essayists such as Teju Cole, Darryl Pinckney, and Clifford Thompson, who have found broad acceptance in white academic circles, have felt called upon to reflect about the police actions visited on Black people. Depression among minority groups is a subject taken up by Margo Jefferson and Yiyun Li. The tightrope situation of biracial individuals (Alexander Chee) or of immigrants who continue to inhabit two spheres (Aleksandar Hemon) guarantees a tension suitable for an essay\u2019s exploration. The outrage that the #MeToo movement produced regarding the sexual harassment, condescension, and mistreatment of women in the workplace is given sharp expression in Rebecca Solnit\u2019s \u201cCassandra Among the Creeps.\u201d<\/p>\n

One dilemma for the contemporary essayist is how to tackle a social problem while avoiding self-righteousness or strident virtue signaling. To oversimplify: many younger essayists, armed with a checklist of deplorables (racism, sexism, ableism, ageism, homophobia, ethnocentrism, speciesism), set out to denounce these prejudices by recounting how they have witnessed or been victimized by them. They show a commendable sensitivity to the discomfort of minorities and a perhaps overactive desire to restrict any speech that might offend, in line with the trigger warnings, safe zones, and checking of privilege that many campuses now invite. There has been some pushback from older essayists, such as Lynn Freed and Camille Paglia, against the ideological policing of literature: these authors issue from a more skeptical, ironic tradition, and insist on the writer\u2019s and instructor\u2019s freedom to question, provoke, complicate, argue, and dispute orthodox ideas. Somewhere in the middle may be found, for example, Wesley Yang\u2019s \u201cWe Out Here,\u201d which seeks to balance the stoical acceptance that life will always bring pain and indignity with an admiration for youth\u2019s idealistic opposition to such slights.<\/p>\n

In times of calamity, it is only natural for writers to respond to the crisis as concerned citizens. \u201cThese days,\u201d observes the poet Gregory Pardlo, wistfully, \u201cwe feel pulled out of our private selves and called to perform our public accountability.\u201d On the other hand, Harold Bloom warns that, whatever the impulse writers might feel toward commitment to social change, \u201cThe pleasures of reading indeed are selfish rather than social. I am wary of any arguments whatever that connect the pleasures of reading to the public good.\u201d So each essayist must find a way to navigate between commenting on the times, opportunistically or otherwise, and mining the secrets of the interior self for the reader\u2019s pleasure and enlightenment.<\/p>\n

Of course, there are many impressive essays that have nothing to do with topical controversies or identity politics, but that grapple with eternal questions of life and death, suffering and illness, love and joy, family life. Religion and transcendence are examined in Anne Carson\u2019s brilliant analysis, \u201cDecreation.\u201d The mortician-essayist Thomas Lynch displays an expert\u2019s take on death in \u201cBodies in Motion and at Rest.\u201d Love and loss are movingly explored by Bernard Cooper in \u201cGreedy Sleep\u201d and David Lazar\u2019s \u201cAnn; Death and the Maiden,\u201d while relationship\u2019s perils are enumerated in Laura Kipnis\u2019s sardonic \u201cDomestic Gulags.\u201d The complicated ties that bind parents and children are demonstrated in Rivka Galchen\u2019s \u201cThe Case of the Angry Daughter\u201d and Meghan Daum\u2019s \u201cMatricide.\u201d Then there are simply the pleasures of wasting time leafing through interior decorating magazines, as in Terry Castle\u2019s \u201cHome Alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Humor will always have an honored place in the contemporary essay: David Sedaris (represented by \u201cThis Old House\u201d) has mastered the form, as have Sloane Crosley and Samantha Irby. Finally, there is writing about one\u2019s own literary practice: Patricia Hampl assessing the guilt of writing about others, or veteran John McPhee taking us through his messy stages of composition in \u201cDraft No. 4.\u201d In a world that often makes little sense, sometimes the only way to face down uncertainty is to write. What better vehicle to process shifting hunches and anxieties than the essay, the ideal form for tracking one\u2019s thoughts? If some larger pattern or resolution can be teased from the effort, so much the better. If they don\u2019t add up in the end, maybe that is its own valid truth, matching as it does the spirit of our deeply unsure and divided age.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Phillip Lopate is the author of <\/em>To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction\u00a0and four essay collections,\u00a0<\/em>Bachelorhood, <\/em>Against Joie de Vivre, <\/em>Portrait of My Body,\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Portrait Inside My Head. He is the editor of the anthologies\u00a0<\/em>The Glorious American Essay, <\/em>The Golden Age of the American Essay, <\/em>The Art of the Personal Essay, <\/em>Writing New York,\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>American Movie Critics. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. He is a professor of writing at Columbia University\u2019s nonfiction M.F.A. program and lives in Brooklyn, New York.<\/em><\/p>\n

From <\/em>The Contemporary American Essay<\/a>, edited and with an introduction by Phillip Lopate. Copyright \u00a9 2021 by Phillip Lopate. Published by arrangement with Anchor Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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