Review: The Best American Essays 2018

The Best American Essays 2018 by Hilton Als
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this volume most years, and I realize I’ve been coming to it, metaphorically, the way you might go to an office holiday party. That is, part of me wants to go – I enjoy good essays, and I enjoy a good party – but another part of me dreads it. It means having fun on someone else’s schedule; it means being in the middle of something and being called upon to share the larger emotion. (And it means thinking about how I want to use it in my upcoming class.)

I’m happy to say that this is one of the stronger volumes in the series, one of the better parties. (It may fall a bit short of 2006, but then Lauren Slater may be the best essayist we have going.) As usual, our host is Bob Atwan, and that’s a good thing. I like Atwan as a writer and as a thinker about the essay form, and I like him as a teacher and person. I worked briefly with him more than a decade ago, and he has been considerate and responsive any time I’ve had to reach out to him since. This whole series is his brainchild, and he’s built it from a good idea into arguably the central event of the genre every year.

Our caterer is Hilton Als. I’ve admired Als through his work in earlier volumes of the series, but I haven’t always felt in step with him. He’s written a couple pieces I’ve thought worthy of sharing with students (a high honor) but I’ve also felt as if I weren’t quite picking up on all his cues and references. I worried he’d select from among Atwan’s semi-final suggestions some essays that wore their difficulty on their sleeves. I prefer the essay that glides, and I prefer the essay that begins with the personal and moves into the public or political. (To be fair, Als writes that way himself; he just sometimes moves into the public in a rhythm that catches me off guard.)

To be fair, nothing makes it into any of these volumes without being pretty good, but I’m always on the lookout for the personal essay as opposed to the topical, political, or analytical. That’s what I’m teaching – how an essayist can open up to the world – but it’s also often more satisfying. If you can make something compelling from your own compulsions, well, you’ve done it all without a net.

In this case, Als is broad in the different pieces he’s selected, but everything has a touch of the personal. I’m glad to find that even the ones steeped in research give a glimpse of the thinker/essayist beneath. There’s something to enjoy about the self even in the essays by Baron Wormser or Leslie Jamison, ones that generally report on, respectively, Hannah Arendt and the women’s march on Washington.

There are people here whom, to keep the party metaphor alive, I generally try to stay on the other side of the room from. There’s Noam Chomsky, for instance. He’s often irritating not so much because he’s right – which he often is – but because he seems always to be hectoring. He’s a progenitor of a certain kind of political purity; you’re with him or you’re against him. I’ve read his work and felt an intolerance of perspective; I may also disdain the perspective, but I don’t have the same impatience or judgement for it. This time, at this party, he’s well-behaved, though. His piece on climate change as existential threat is, oddly, milder in tone than I’m used to. He is as correct as he usually is, but he’s simply less obnoxious about it.

And over there is Rick Moody. He’s that weird guy, the one you don’t feel comfortable admitting you have a lot in common with. He can be self-indulgent – and his tangent here about his thoughts on Nick Cave’s one-time guitar playing certainly feel that way – but he’s onto something with his “Notes on Lazarus.” For much of this, as with the best essays, you feel a restless mind at work, one that slowly moves toward something like peace. Moody doesn’t exactly do peace – at the very least, in what I’ve read, he’s attacking the form of his genre – but he catches a powerful wave and invites us to ride it with him for a while.

As far as I’m concerned, the best of these are the ones by Marilyn Abildskov, Beth Uznis Johnson, and Kathryn Schulz. The first is a clever and moving depersonalization; Abildskov tells the story of a near relationship through the technical challenges of weaving a story. In hers, Johnson explores a “friendship” she finds with the mutual friend of someone who committed suicide. Through the weirdness of Facebook, they’re “introduced” by the dead friend, and the echoes are moving. And Schulz starts with a seemingly light series of reflections about what it means to “lose” things in the sense of misplacing them, and then somehow ratchets it into a beautiful meditation on losing her father.

Beyond those excellent ones, there really are no stinkers at all in this collection. Granting that, in this context, there’s something to admire in anything Atwan awards semi-finalist standing, there aren’t any here that turn me off with their self-indulgence, esoteric tone, or pretentiousness. Three home runs is about the average for me in reading these anthologies, but there are usually at least a couple “stinkers.” Given that most of the others I haven’t mentioned are also very impressive (I think of the terribly sad, posthumous essay by David Wong Louie in particular) this is certainly worth picking up.


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