By Harvey Freedenberg
Harvey Freedenberg practices intellectual property law and litigation with a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania law firm. In 2000, he took a six-month sabbatical from his law practice and studied creative writing with novelist Susan Perabo at his alma mater, Dickinson College. Four of his short stories have won prizes, and he has written an as yet unpublished novel. Harvey, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, reviews both fiction and nonfiction for BookPage, Bookreporter.com, Shelf Awareness and the Minneapolis Star Tribune and writes a monthly column on books for Harrisburg Magazine. He is @HarvF on Twitter.
Although most of the books I review are novels or short story collections, when one of my editors dangles a fresh collection of essays before me I’m quick to bite. That’s why it’s surprising to me that despite my enthusiasm for the form (as evidenced by the fact, as LibraryThing.com reminds me, that my library contains nearly 300 volumes of them), I don’t often find myself recommending a book of essays when a friend invariably asks the question all reviewers dread: “What should I read?” It’s partially to atone for that omission that I offer, with what I hope is the conciseness displayed by the best essays, a handful of reasons (citing some recent examples, most from books I’ve reviewed) why I find a well-crafted essay so appealing, and why you should be reading some if you aren’t now.
1. Essays inspire me to think, argue, debate. That’s especially true when my political or cultural perspective is light years from the author’s, as it often is with Joseph Epstein, one of the essayists I most admire (Narcissus Leaves the Pool; In a Cardboard Belt!). There’s no better way to sharpen critical thinking skills than to follow the thread of a well-constructed argument to its logical conclusion and then return to the first sentence to study how it was done, analyzing the framework of craftsmanship on which the sturdiest essays are built.
2. Essays make me both more self-aware and more empathetic. I can see my own struggles and accomplishments in the experiences of the author or perceive something that helps give definition and shape to my appreciation of others’ lives. Floyd Skloot’s The Wink of the Zenith, the fourth in a series of collections he wrote to gather the “shards of memory” after he was stricken by a debilitating neurological virus, features unsentimental essays exploring childhood memories that will resonate with anyone old enough to recall the days of tiny black and white televisions or a time when hours of unstructured, imaginative play defined the way we spent our summers. Then there’s a heartbreaking essay like Mark Slouka’s “Blood on the Tracks,” from his brilliant volume Essays in the Nick of Time, in which he recounts the death of a homeless woman and her four children in a tragic train accident, yet another painful example of how “now and again the parallel world of unspeakable things breaks through.”
3. Essays make me laugh. What’s more bracing than an amusing essay filled with aphorisms that make you want to grab the first person you encounter and quote them? “Comedy is hard,” someone once said, and I agree, and whether it’s the absurdity of just about any piece in Woody Allen’s Without Feathers or the sardonic wit of Nora Ephron’s “The Story of My Life in 3,500 Words or Less” from I Feel Bad About My Neck, I admire the skill of a writer of humorous essays who can make the high wire act that is comic writing look effortless.
4. Essays help me understand the world. Some of our finest contemporary novelists—writers like Marilynne Robinson (When I Was a Child I Read Books), Jonathan Franzen (Farther Away) turn out to be equally adept at producing essays that expose how television excels at the “marketing of rancor” (Robinson) or explain how the cell phone “enables and encourages the inflicting of the personal and individual on the public and communal” (Franzen). The best of these essays, in what Lewis Lapham, the former editor of Harper’s Magazine and an accomplished essayist himself, called “a thinking out loud,” sift through the cacophony of what passes for information or knowledge and distill at least some of it into something resembling wisdom.
5. Essays are short. Like most people I often feel pressed for time, especially reading time, and in half an hour of essay reading I can consume more good writing than in the many hours it might take me to read a full-length memoir or other work of nonfiction. Some of the essays in Sven Birkerts’ collection, The Other Walk, clock in at fewer than three pages and virtually every one—his use of the game of chess as a metaphor for the end of a friendship, an account of his son’s near death in a boating accident or the elegiac story of his year working in the original Borders store in Ann Arbor—contains some gem of insight. Simply weighing intellectual and emotional payback against time invested, the rate of return on essay reading is immeasurable.
In the introduction to his definitive collection, The Art of the Personal Essay, Philip Lopate calls the form “one of the most approachable and diverting types of literature we possess.” That’s because, in Lopate’s estimation, “the hallmark of the personal essay is intimacy.” For any or all of these reasons, the finest essays make me feel as if I’m sitting across the table chatting over steaming coffees with some of the brightest, wisest, funniest people I know. They’re a welcome dash of seasoning to any reader’s literary diet.
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What’s your experience with essays? What makes the form appealing to you? Any recommendations?
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