The Best American Essays 2010 [ペーパーバック]

Of all the anthologies appearing annually under the "Best American" rubric, the one whose quality appears most highly dependent on the particular choice of guest editor is the "Best American Essays" collection. Just compare the 2007 and 2008 collections, edited respectively by David Foster Wallace and Adam Gopnik, to see just how much difference a guest editor can make (DFW leaves Gopnik in the dust, unsurprisingly). So I was somewhat reassured to see Christopher Hitchens as this year's invited editor. After all, Hitchens can be regarded as a kind of literary Simon Cowell -- someone who projects the image of being way too self-satisfied with his own gleefully obnoxious persona, but who's nonetheless possessed of reasonably good judgment, with a refreshing unwillingness to suffer fools gladly. Although one might be repelled by his personality, the chances of his serving up a plateful of dud essays seemed remote. At the very least, he seemed likely to have high editorial standards and a broad range of interests. So I had high hopes for this year's anthology.

Which were, unfortunately, not quite met. The 2010 collection of "best" essays is not a complete failure. Many of the contributions are excellent, though there are few that I would classify as outstanding (Steven Pinker's "My Genome, Myself" is an honorable exception, though I had already read it twice - in the NY Times when it first appeared, and in the 2010 anthology of Best American Science Writing; James Woods's New Yorker piece on George Orwell, "A Fine Rage", also shines, as does Jane Churchon's exquisite "The Dead Book"). But there were many pieces that simply failed to take off, in that the reader could only observe the writer's passion for his subject, but was never moved to share it ("Brooklyn the Unknowable", "Rediscovering Central Asia", "Gettysburg Regress" all proved too soporific for me to finish). And I remain puzzled as to the reason for including the longest essay in the collection, a 24-page profile of former Washington DC mayor, Marion Barry, whose relevance in 2010 would appear to be non-existent. Retired ophthalmologist John Gamel's beautifully written piece "The Elegant Eyeball" was spoiled for me by being about a decade behind the times as far as available treatments were concerned. I thought Zadie Smith's recent essay collection Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays was astonishing, but "Speaking in Tongues" is not the essay I would have singled out for inclusion here. Fans of David Sedaris will be more delighted than I was by inclusion of his piece "Guy Walks into a Bar Car", but my Sedaris-fatigue is long-established, so your mileage may vary.

A breakdown of essay by general topic/type is revealing:

# of pieces concerned with writers/writing - 8 of 21
# of pieces that are autobiographical - 10 of 21

Even allowing for some double counting between those two categories, that's still an awful lot of navel-gazing for a 250-page volume. And this is ultimately what prevents this collection from being anything more than pretty deceent. Perhaps if writers understood that the world of writers and writing is nowhere near as infinitely fascinating to the general reader as it apparently is to them, there would be a greater chance of producing an anthology of pieces that are genuinely interesting.

I thought Christopher Hitchens might have the breadth of vision to produce a genuinely dazzling collection this year. I was wrong. The 2010 anthology is not an embarrassment. But neither is it particularly exciting.

Christopher Hitchens, Guest Editor for the 2010 edition, has selected a beefy bunch of essays, substantial pieces of writing that take the title "essay" seriously. All of the essays are from print publications - none of this online frippery. Selections in this volume first appeared in such publications as The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Harper's, among others. Several of the essays are on literary lives including John Updike, Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Nabokov, and appropriately enough, Michel de Montaigne. Even the potentially light essays, one each by David Sedaris and Elif Batuman, are introspective enough to be taken quite seriously.

My favorites from the collection this year are -

*The Murder of Tolstoy, in which Elif Batuman presents a daringly original thesis before a gathering of Tolstoy scholars.

*When Writers Speak, in which Arthur Krystal contemplates the difference between how elegantly writers express themselves in writing and how different they sound when they speak.

*The Elegant Eyeball, in which ophthalmologist John Gamel relates his experiences with eyeballs, some attached to living humans and some not.

*My Genome, My Self, in which psychologist Steven Pinker has his genome mapped.

*Speaking in Tongues, in which Zadie Smith observes that the voice she speaks with today is vastly different from the one she grew up with, and how, like Eliza Doolittle, she can't go back to her old voice.

On the plus side, by reading this book I get a pretty good idea how my taste in writing lines up with Christopher Hitchens. On the minus side, it seems that there is not a whole lot of overlap. There are quite a few essays here where people talk about their professional expertise in an arty kind of way, slightly above what you'd get from sitting next to them in an airplane. But I don't like airplane seat neighbor conversation very much, so those essays (by an eye doctor, by writers talking about language in a personal way) were rather dull for me.

There is the obligatory essay by David Sedaris. He's not my cup of tea; I find him way too glib. There are some fawning pieces about Updike and Buckley from Ian McEwan and Garry Wills, respectively. I like both Updike and Buckley quite a bit, but the essays about them seem a bit forced.

Overall, I was kind of bored by this collection. The quality of the writing is often just OK. The topics tend to the arcane. For me, this volume is saved by a remarkable piece by Matt Labash on Marion Barry. I don't really care about Marion Barry in the least. But I kept reading that essay with interest throughout. That piece is right up there with the best of Gay Talese You can find the it online here ([...]). It's really a wonderful work of journalism.