by David Brooks
Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Foreword: Of Topics
Introduction
BENJAMIN ANASTAS: The Foul Reign of “Self-Reliance”
MARCIA ANGELL: The Crazy State of Psychiatry
MIAH ARNOLD: Chapter
GEOFFREY BENT: Edward Hopper and the Geometry of Despair
ROBERT BOYERS: A Beauty
DUDLEY CLENDINEN: The Good Short Life
PAUL COLLINS: Vanishing Act
MARK DOTY: Insatiable
MARK EDMUNDSON: Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here?
JOSEPH EPSTEIN: Duh, Bor-ing
JONATHAN FRANZEN: Farther Away
MALCOLM GLADWELL: Creation Myth
PETER HESSLER: Dr. Don
EWA HRYNIEWICZ-YARBROUGH: Objects of Affection
GARRET KEIZER: Getting Schooled
DAVID J. LAWLESS: My Father/My Husband
ALAN LIGHTMAN: The Accidental Universe
SANDRA TSING LOH: The Bitch Is Back
KEN MURRAY: How Doctors Die
FRANCINE PROSE: Other Women
RICHARD SENNETT: Humanism 1
LAUREN SLATER: Killing My Body to Save My Mind
JOSE ANTONIO VARGAS: Outlaw
WESLEY YANG: Paper Tigers
Contributors’ Notes
Notable Essays of 2011
Notable Special Issues of 2011
About the Editors
Copyright © 2012 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
Introduction copyright © 2012 by David Brooks
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“The Foul Reign of ‘Self-Reliance’” by Benjamin Anastas. First published in The New York Times Magazine, December 4, 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Benjamin Anastas. Reprinted by permission of Benjamin Anastas.
“The Crazy State of Psychiatry” by Marcia Angell. First published in two parts as “The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?” (June 23, 2011) and “The Illusions of Psychiatry” (July 14, 2011) in The New York Review of Books. Copyright © 2011 by Marcia Angell. Reprinted by permission of Marcia Angell.
“You Owe Me” by Miah Arnold. First published in Michigan Quarterly Review, Winter 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Miah Arnold. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Edward Hopper and the Geometry of Despair” by Geoffrey Bent. First published in Boulevard, 78, 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Geoffrey Bent. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“A Beauty” by Robert Boyers. First published in AGNI 74, 2011. Copyright © 2011 by AGNI. Reprinted by permission of Robert Boyers.
“The Good Short Life” by Dudley Clendinen. First published in The New York Times Sunday Review, July 10, 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Dudley Clendinen. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Vanishing Act” by Paul Collins. First published in Lapham’s Quarterly, Winter 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Paul Collins. Reprinted by permission of Lapham’s Quarterly.
“Insatiable” by Mark Doty. First published in Granta #117 (Autumn 2011). Copyright © 2011 by Mark Doty. Reprinted by permission of William Morris Endeavor.
“Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here?” by Mark Edmundson. First published in The Oxford American (The Education Issue). Copyright © 2011 by Mark Edmundson. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Duh, Bor-ing” by Joseph Epstein. First published in Commentary, June 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Joseph Epstein. Reprinted by permission of Joseph Epstein.
“Farther Away” by Jonathan Franzen. First published in The New Yorker, April 18, 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Jonathan Franzen. Reprinted by permission of The Susan Golomb Literary Agency.
“Creation Myth” by Malcolm Gladwell. First published in The New Yorker, May 16, 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Malcolm Gladwell. Reprinted by permission of Malcolm Gladwell.
“Dr. Don” by Peter Hessler. First published in The New Yorker, September 26, 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Peter Hessler. Reprinted by permission of Peter Hessler.
“Objects of Affection” by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough. First published in Ploughshares, Spring 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough. Reprinted by permission of Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough.
“Getting Schooled” by Garret Keizer. First published in Harper’s Magazine, September 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Harper’s Magazine. Reprinted by permission of Garret Keizer.
“My Father/My Husband” by David J. Lawless. First published in Prism, Spring 2011. Copyright © 2011 by David J. Lawless. Reprinted by permission of David J. Lawless.
“The Accidental Universe” by Alan Lightman. First published in Harper’s Magazine, December 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Alan Lightman. Reprinted by permission of Alan Lightman and Harper’s Magazine.
“The Bitch Is Back” by Sandra Tsing Loh. First published in The Atlantic, October 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Sandra Tsing Loh. Reprinted by permission of Sandra Tsing Loh.
“How Doctors Die” by Ken Murray. First published in Zocalo Public Square, November 30, 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Ken Murray. Reprinted by permission of Ken Murray.
“Other Women” by Francine Prose. First published in Granta #115, Spring 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Francine Prose. Reprinted by permission of Denise Shannon Literary Agency, Inc.
“Humanism” by Richard Sennett. First published in The Hedgehog Review, Summer 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Richard Sennett. Reprinted by permission of Richard Sennett.
“Killing My Body to Save My Mind” by Lauren Slater. First published in Elle, August 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Lauren Slater. Reprinted by permission of Lauren Slater.
“Outlaw” by Jose Antonio Vargas. First published in The New York Times Magazine, June 26, 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Jose Antonio Vargas. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Paper Tigers” by Wesley Yang. First published in New York Magazine, May 8, 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Wesley Yang. Reprinted by permission of Wesley Yang.
Foreword: Of Topics
WHENEVER I GET into discussions about the essay with creative writing students, I discover a peculiar notion they have about my favorite genre. They apparently believe that when they write an essay—whether it’s required or inspired—they should write about themselves. An essay for many of them is wholly autobiographical, pure and simple. When they start writing, they seem to have only one template in mind: a straightforward personal narrative heavily interspersed with “realistic” dialogue and told in a sincere, casual voice intended to be wholly congruous with their own.
Textured and original description is minimal, as are—if I may use the
word—ideas. Forget surprising metaphors or memorable observations. Missing, too, is the one literary element that the greatest essays thrive on—reflection. Forgive the redundancy; there is very little meditation, contemplation, deliberation, rumination. It seems as though students want their essays to look like true-to-life short stories that conform to the creative writing manual’s central mantra: Show, Don’t Tell.
Why? I wonder. It wasn’t always this way. Essays were traditionally written on topics. In the older writing textbooks students were often presented with a long list of topics that might stimulate essays, though the topics themselves could be quite unstimulating, the schoolteacher’s all-time favorite being “What I Did on My Summer Vacation.” Yet for the preeminent essayists, the approach to a topic, no matter how commonplace, is part of the genre’s artistry. Look, for example, at how E. B. White treats the American summer vacation in his eerie classic “Once More to the Lake.”
The inner dynamics of the genre often depended on the essayist’s persona leisurely and often unsystematically grappling with or dancing around a topic. It could be Francis Bacon on friendship, Joseph Addison on witches, Samuel Johnson on bashfulness, William Hazlitt on the pleasures of hating, Ralph Waldo Emerson on manners, Agnes Repplier on cats, G. K. Chesterton on sentiment, Virginia Woolf on middlebrow, or Annie Dillard on mirages. Or Jonathan Swift’s remarkable contribution to the genre, “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public.”
Though engaged with topics—some entertaining, others savage—these are still all personal essays, based often on subjective experience and an individual perspective. Emerson was not attempting to be Emily Post, offering the final word on manners, though he could be prescriptive: “The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight.” Imagine Miss Manners advising her audience against using superlatives! All conversation, especially literary and cultural, would come to a halt. Without screams, superlatives, and heated conversation, television talk shows could not exist. Indeed, this series of books, and others like it, are based on a superlative Emerson might find distasteful.
By temperament, the essayist doesn’t favor the final word but prefers to remain in an exploratory frame of mind. Essayists like to examine—or, to use an essayist’s favorite term, consider—topics from various perspectives. To consider is not necessarily to conclude; the essayist delights in a suspension of judgment and even an inconsistency that usually annoys the “so what’s your point?” reader. The essayist, by and large, agrees with Robert Frost that thinking and voting are two different acts.
So the essayist’s take on a topic is neither conclusive nor exhaustive; nor is it systematic. And at times what appears to be an announced topic turns out to be something else. Such essayistic maneuvers go back to Montaigne, who loved to take a topic through a bewildering maze of associations, so that at one moment he’s considering sneezing, the next seasickness, then fear, and that leads to the essay’s titular topic, coaches. Essayists had this sort of literary fun with topics for centuries, and their so-called digressions became not a compositional flaw but a virtue, as readers learned to take delight in pursuing links that were not always obvious, as they are in less literary articles.
But by the early twentieth century, the essayist’s leisurely, digressive, and impressionistic approach to a topic grew out of fashion, as did the familiar essay in general. In 1951, the essay seemed so obsolete that Joseph Wood Krutch in an essay called “No Essays, Please!” wrote: “The very word ‘essay’ has fallen into such disfavor that it is avoided with horror, and anything which is not fiction is usually called either an ‘article,’ a ‘story,’ or just ‘a piece.’” Modern magazine journalism had little use for the traditional essay, and the centuries-old relationship of writer to topic reversed itself, with the writer now becoming subservient to the topic. To be sure, the magazines wanted topics, but they now demanded timely, or “topical,” topics, not personal reflections (pejoratively known in the industry as thumb-sucking) about manners, cats, or hating. The nineteenth-century essayist could ruminate on jealousy by citing Othello and other relevant literary or historical works and sprinkling personal observations on human behavior into the mix. The modern essayist covering the same topic would be obligated to include findings and research from the latest journals of psychology and psychoanalysis, along with interview quotations from mental health professionals. In “Duh, Bor-ing,” Joseph Epstein notices a similar trend in the essay today: “With-it-ness now calls for checking in with what the neuroscientists have to say about your subject, whatever it might be.” The traditional essayists didn’t hesitate to quote, but they almost always quoted from literature, not scientific studies. They didn’t cite or interview experts. This shift, reflecting a change in the expectations of readers, profoundly transformed the genre.
Those wanting to compose traditional essays found themselves caught in a bind. In their demand for more researched and informative essays, the magazines turned increasingly to experts in various fields. The experts didn’t always produce eloquent prose, but they provided the new reading public with what it wanted—to be informed and up-to-date on the leading topics of the day. Some splendid essayists could adapt to these demands. Edmund Wilson did his research and his investigations with rigor, although he remained at war with specialists and academics throughout his career. After all, he possessed only a BA (Princeton, 1916) and had the presumption to write about topics that might better have been left in the hands of the experts, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, literary symbolism, and the federal income tax. Many others adapted but felt the restrictions and requirements of journalism had injured the essay as a literary genre.
What to do? Where to go? Enter the memoir, autobiographical essay, and confessional narrative, which, if I’m correct, now supply today’s writing students with their major compositional models. Why try to compete with experts on a topic, to engage in difficult and often tedious research, when one is already an expert on one’s own life? It may be that the memoir came into its own because writers were trying to circumvent the demands for professional expertise and factual information. One difficulty with the personal narrative, however, is that it too often invites authors to embellish their life story so that it sounds more novelistic and dramatic than it actually is, especially when it comes to suffering, deprivation, addiction, family dysfunction, and abuse. Writers discovered that editors and publishers, though they may be partial to happy outcomes (addictions and disabilities overcome), rarely seem interested in happy lives. Some writers also learned to their embarrassment that personal misery could be fact-checked as diligently as any other information.
In his introduction to the 2007 volume in this series, David Foster Wallace was especially tough on what he called “abreactive or confessional memoirs.” Not because their “popularity” seemed to him “a symptom of something especially sick and narcissistic/voyeuristic about U.S. culture right now,” but because, as he says, “I just don’t trust them . . . Not so much their factual truth as their agenda. The sense I get from a lot of contemporary memoirs is that they have an unconscious and unacknowledged project, which is to make the memoirists seem as endlessly fascinating and important to the reader as they are to themselves. I find most of them sad in a way I don’t think their authors intend.”
Although I have no objections to “abreactive” memoirs or confessional writing (which, when done well, can be as compelling as any literary form), I would, if I were teaching in an MFA program, try to revive interest among students in the topic-oriented essay. From the start, they would need to understand that—as we know from all the great essayists—ruminating on a topic doesn’t mean that the writing will be impersonal. The essayist’s reflections will be indistinguishable from a particular personality and temperament, as can be seen in this volume in Geoffrey Bent’s “Edward Hopper a
nd the Geometry of Despair,” where the author, who is not an art historian, offers us his own observations on the great American artist’s work. In speaking of Hopper’s attraction to architecture, Bent writes, “Hopper loved buildings and found so much character in them they almost function as faces: the spent gentility of a Victorian façade, the spare sufficiency of a clapboard cottage, the redundant thrust of a brick tenement. In his hands, shutters and sills, pilasters and porticos are as individualizing as noses and ears.”
Yet why do I find it hard to imagine an essay like Bent’s being composed in nonfiction workshops today? Could it be that many students don’t know enough, don’t have favorite artists, composers, books? Or have no passion for anything outside themselves and their own microculture? Or could it be that today’s young writers are afraid to tackle subjects that are presumably for experts? In other words, that they believe that an explication of Hopper’s artistic genius could only be set forth by someone with a PhD in American art history? Are students so intimidated by expertise that they’ve lost confidence in their own powers of observation?
Essayists also traditionally found topics in books and authors. Montaigne’s essays are interwoven with references to the classics: Plutarch, Virgil, Horace, Pliny, and countless others. Samuel Johnson wrote brilliant essays on the lives of the English poets, and Virginia Woolf first demonstrated her mastery of the essay form (as well as her love of Montaigne) in The Common Reader. That tradition is best seen today in the review essay, a literary form often featured in such prominent periodicals as the New York Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine, and the Atlantic. Note how “In the Bitch Is Back” Sandra Tsing Loh discusses a recent book on the topic of menopause while simultaneously offering readers a lively and unforgettable glimpse into her personal experiences with “the Change.”
In my praise of topics, I’m not suggesting that essayists return to a belletristic or genteel mode of detached whimsicality. We live in an altogether different time—as the essays in this collection make abundantly clear—and are engaged with far different issues. But an obsession with oneself and a preoccupation with narrative (why do these seem intertwined?) can be as restrictive as the journalistic standards many literary essayists would like to escape. Deliberation on a topic also returns one to the creative roots of the genre: essaying, the trying out of, or fooling around with, ideas and observations, an imaginative activity that the first-person narrative as it’s usually written today leaves little room for. Writing students in nonfiction, perhaps, need to back off a little on “showing” and reconsider the art of “telling.”
