The Best American Essays 2016
Jonathan Franzen
Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Foreword by Robert Atwan
Introduction by Jonathan Franzen
FRANCISCO CANTÚ, Bajadas
ALEXANDER CHEE, Girl
CHARLES COMEY, Against Honeymoons
PAUL CRENSHAW, Names
JAQUIRA DÍAZ, Ordinary Girls
IRINA DUMITRESCU, My Father and The Wine
ELA HARRISON, My Heart Lies Between “The Fleet” and “All the Ships”
SEBASTIAN JUNGER, The Bonds of Battle
LAURA KIPNIS, Sexual Paranoia
JORDAN KISNER, Thin Places
AMITAVA KUMAR, Pyre
RICHARD M. LANGE, Of Human Carnage
LEE MARTIN, Bastards
LISA NIKOLIDAKIS, Family Tradition
JOYCE CAROL OATES, The Lost Sister: An Elegy
MARSHA POMERANTZ, Right/Left: A Triptych
JILL SISSON QUINN, Big Night
JUSTIN PHILLIP REED, Killing Like They Do in the Movies
OLIVER SACKS, A General Feeling of Disorder
KATHERINE E. STANDEFER, In Praise of Contempt
GEORGE STEINER, The Eleventh Commandment
MASON STOKES, Namesake
THOMAS CHATTERTON WILLIAMS, Black and Blue and Blond
Contributors’ Notes
Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction of 2015
Notable Special Issues of 2015
Read More from The Best American Series®
About the Editors
Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
Introduction copyright © 2016 by Jonathan Franzen
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“Bajadas” by Francisco Cantú. First published in Ploughshares, Winter 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Francisco Cantú. Reprinted by permission of Francisco Cantú.
“Girl” by Alexander Chee. First published in Guernica, March 16, 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Alexander Chee. Reprinted by permission of the Wylie Agency, LLC.
“Against Honeymoons” by Charles Comey. First published in the Point, Summer 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Charles Comey. Reprinted by permission of Charles Comey.
“Names” by Paul Crenshaw. First published in Hobart, November 2, 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Paul Crenshaw. Reprinted by permission of Hobart.
“Ordinary Girls” by Jaquira Díaz. First published in Kenyon Review, Nov/Dec, 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Jaquira Díaz. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“My Father and the Wine” by Irina Dumitrescu. First published in the Yale Review, April 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Irina Dumitrescu. Reprinted by permission of Irina Dumitrescu.
“My Heart Lies Between ‘The Fleet’ and ‘All the Ships’” by Ela Harrison. First published in the Georgia Review, Winter 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Ela Harrison. Reprinted by permission of Ela Harrison.
“The Bonds of Battle” by Sebastian Junger. First published in Vanity Fair, June 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Sebastian Junger. Reprinted by permission of Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency, Inc.
“Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe” by Laura Kipnis. First published in the Chronicle Review, February 27, 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Laura Kipnis. Reprinted by permission of Laura Kipnis.
“Thin Places” by Jordan Kisner. First published in n + 1, Spring 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Jordan Kisner. Reprinted by permission of Jordan Kisner.
“Pyre” by Amitava Kumar. First published in Granta, no. 130, 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Amitava Kumar. Reprinted by permission of Amitava Kumar.
“Of Human Carnage” by Richard M. Lange. First published in Catamaran Literary Reader, Winter 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Richard M. Lange. Reprinted by permission of Richard M. Lange.
“Bastards” by Lee Martin. First published in the Georgia Review, Summer 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Lee Martin. Reprinted by permission of Lee Martin.
“Family Tradition” by Lisa Nikolidakis. First published in Southern Indiana Review, Spring 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Lisa Nikolidakis. Reprinted by permission of Lisa Nikolidakis.
“The Lost Sister: An Elegy” by Joyce Carol Oates. First published in Narrative Magazine, Fall 2015. From The Lost Landscape by Joyce Carol Oates. Copyright © 2015 by the Ontario Review, Inc. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
“Right/Left: A Triptych” by Marsha Pomerantz. First published in Raritan, Summer 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Marsha Pomerantz. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Big Night” by Jill Sisson Quinn. First published in New England Review, no. 36/1, 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Jill Sisson Quinn. Reprinted by permission of Jill R. Quinn/New England Review.
“Killing Like They Do in the Movies” by Justin Phillip Reed. First published in Catapult, October 30, 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Justin Phillip Reed. Reprinted by permission of Justin Phillip Reed.
“A General Feeling of Disorder” by Oliver Sacks. First published in the New York Review of Books, April 23, 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Oliver Sacks. Reprinted by permission of the Wylie Agency, LLC.
“In Praise of Contempt” by Katherine E. Standefer. First published in the Iowa Review, vol. 45, Issue 3, Winter 2015/2016. Copyright © 2015 by Katherine E. Standefer. Reprinted by permission of Katherine E. Standefer.
“The Eleventh Commandment” by George Steiner. First published in Salmagundi, Winter/Spring 2015. Copyright © 2015 by George Steiner. Reprinted by permission of George Steiner.
“Namesake” by Mason Stokes. First published in Colorado Review, Summer 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Mason Stokes. Reprinted by permission of Mason Stokes.
“Black and Blue and Blond” by Thomas Chatterton Williams. First published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Thomas Chatterton Williams. Reprinted by permission of Thomas Chatterton Williams.
Foreword
ONE OF THE MOST INTRIGUING—and puzzling—comments I’ve encountered on the art of the essay comes from one of America’s foremost essayists, Ralph Waldo Emerson. After the remarkable Elizabeth Peabody showed her good friend Emerson an essay written by her future brother-in-law, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emerson “complained that there was no inside in it.” Though he never wrote an essay on the essay—most of his remarks on craft and composition are scattered throughout his journals and recorded conversations—Emerson did know plenty about essays and essay-writing. What could he have meant by an essay having “no inside”?
Hawthorne had published the essay Emerson complained about, “Foot-prints on the Sea-shore,” in 183
8. A personal, meditative essay (easily found online) that recounts an afternoon spent in near-solitude at a sandy stretch of beach near his home in Salem, Massachusetts, “Foot-prints” was like nothing Emerson ever wrote or would write. A more accomplished essayist than usually acknowledged, Hawthorne, borrowing from his illustrious predecessor Washington Irving, called the essay a “sketch.” Hawthorne published many sketches, intermingling them with his “tales” and making no distinction between fiction and nonfiction when he collected them in various volumes. With its neoclassical language (perhaps he’s having a bit of fun calling caught fish “scaly prey”) and private musings mixed with erotic suggestions stimulated by his characteristic voyeurism, “Foot-prints” is about as far from Emerson as an essay can get.
But how is Hawthorne’s essay lacking an “inside”? I don’t think Emerson (he and Hawthorne shared no warmth) is complaining here about mere surfaces, superficiality. What I think Emerson finds missing is an interiority, an inner dynamic of creative conflict. Hawthorne seems too evasively comfortable in his little private excursion to the seashore. There seems to be little at stake or at risk emotionally or intellectually. Unlike Emerson’s own essays, Hawthorne’s “Foot-prints” contains no centripetal force. Its movement does not seek a center, a vital “inside.” Or so I suppose Emerson thought when he enigmatically criticized Hawthorne’s essay.
It’s not a long way from “Foot-prints on the Sea-shore” to “Once More to the Lake.” These are both satisfying essays in their way, but Emerson favored a different kinetics, one that—as it turned out—had little influence on future essayists in the way that his literary hero Montaigne indisputedly did. Both essayists are wholly attracted to Pyrrhonism (from the ancient Greek philosopher Pyrrho, who allegedly maintained that nothing can be known with certainty). But Montaigne’s stance of “Que sais-je?” (What do I know?) represented a skepticism immersed in his presence and personality—which centuries later still come alive on the page. In nearly all of Emerson’s writing we do not encounter an engaging personality. We know his thoughts and style of thinking, but we rarely get a glimpse of the man himself. Montaigne’s essays are his memoir; Emerson’s essays, with their chilly impersonality, might be considered almost an anti-memoir. Disappointed readers will always ask the same question: “Where’s Waldo?”
Emerson was preoccupied with sentences. As biographer Robert D. Richardson observes in his succinct book on Emerson’s creative process, First We Read, Then We Write, Emerson spoke of writing only in terms of sentences, not in terms of the essay. But the art of the sentence was not achieved without great struggle. Richardson cites one of Emerson’s letters to his friend Thomas Carlyle: “Here I sit and read and write with very little system and as far as regards composition with the most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle.” This isn’t what one would expect to find in a student’s guide to composition, but Richardson’s admirable book is as close as anyone can come to workshopping the essay with Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Coherence wasn’t one of Emerson’s compositional goals. He famously wrote that “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Richardson expands on this by citing the comments of a Williams College student, Charles Woodbury, a young man Emerson befriended in his sixties and often spoke to about writing, life, and ideas. “Neither concern yourself about consistency,” he once said. “The moment you putty and plaster your expressions to make them hang together, you have begun a weakening process . . . If you must be contradictory, let it be clean and sharp as the two blades of scissors meet.”
He was intellectually suspicious of many conventional rhetorical techniques, which he saw as obstructions to original thought. He dismisses skeletons, outlines, and scaffolding as creative interferences. He dislikes classifications and categorizations. In his journal he admits that many left his lectures “puzzled.” As an orator and one of the most prominent lecturers of his time, he had a devotion to eloquence, but it was not the rhetorical brand of eloquence many expected. Rhetoric comes from the outside and is something we tend to impose on our thoughts. Emerson’s eloquence sought the unsystematic inside: spontaneity, surprise, magic. As a writer and thinker, he was more interested in the spark than the fire.
Yeats memorably said, “Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric, out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.” Emerson aspired to the poetry that originates from that quarrel with ourselves. At the core of the essays we find a remarkable self-opposition that seems to be an abundant source of creativity. A mind in process, he knew, is rarely rhetorically persuasive. Toward the conclusion of one of his finest essays, “Circles,” he writes,
Let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.
Trigger warning: Emerson’s essays are not “safe spaces.” Not even for himself.
And Emerson is not for everyone. For many readers, all that can be seen is the outside—the lofty exhortations, the bewildering transitions, the poetically expressed abstractions. But unless we read him with keen attention to the Wittgensteinian struggle with language going on “inside” the essay, we miss the literary and intellectual exhilaration. There was some fun had at Emerson’s expense a few years ago when someone discovered the English philosopher John Stuart Mill’s surprising comments in his copy of the essays. Mill was not impressed and apparently enjoyed annotating the margins with “nonsense,” “fudge,” “stupid,” “pooh,” “trash,” “sentimental,” “superficial,” and “very stupid.”
A preeminent logician and hardheaded Utilitarian, Mill, a stickler for precision, was clearly no Concord Transcendentalist. Yet despite his marginal barbs, the two thinkers had something important in common: they shared—along with Montaigne—a passion for free and open discussion and a rare mental capacity for self-opposition. In the chapter “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion” in his classic argument On Liberty, Mill demands a level of tolerance and respect for opposing opinions that would seem humanly out of reach at any time, and especially so in our current climate of polarized intolerance. For Mill, like Emerson, nothing was truly settled, and he proposed an all but impossible moral obligation on individual thought: “We can never be sure that the opinion we are attempting to stifle is a false opinion; and, if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.” He believed that “all silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility,” and he maintained what to him represented a crucial distinction: there is “the greatest difference,” he wrote, “between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation.”
Emerson, as I read him, would certainly agree with Mill’s receptivity to contrary opinions, whether they are debated in a public arena or deep within ourselves. And perhaps that simply shows how irrelevant he is today.
The Best American Essays features a selection of the year’s outstanding essays—essays of literary achievement that show an awareness of craft and forcefulness of thought. Hundreds of essays are gathered annually from a wide assortment of national and regional publications. These essays are then screened, and approximately 100 are turned over to a distinguished guest editor, who may add a few personal discoveries and who makes the final selection. The list of notable essays appearing in the back of the book is drawn from a final comprehensive list that includes not only all the essays submitted to the guest editor but also many that were not submitted.
To qualify for the volume, the essay must be a work of respectable literary quality, intended as a fully developed, independent essay (not an excerpt) on a subject of general interest (not specialized scholarship), originally written in English (or translated by the auth
or) for publication in an American periodical during the calendar year. Note that abridgements and excerpts taken from longer works and published in magazines do not qualify for the series, but if considered significant they will appear in the list of notable essays in the back of the volume. Today’s essay is a highly flexible and shifting form, however, so these criteria are not carved in stone.
Magazine editors who want to be sure their contributors will be considered each year should submit issues or subscriptions to
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Writers and editors are welcome to submit published essays from any American periodical for consideration; unpublished work does not qualify for the series and cannot be reviewed or evaluated. Also ineligible are essays that have been published in book form—such as a contribution to a collection—but have never appeared in a periodical. All submissions must be directly from the publication and not in manuscript or printout format. Editors of online magazines and literary bloggers should not assume that appropriate work will be seen; they are invited to submit printed copies of the essays to the address above. Please note that, owing to the increasing number of submissions from online sources, material that does not include a full citation (name of publication, date of publication, and author contact information) will no longer be considered.
I’d like to dedicate this thirty-first volume in the series to the great essayist, neurologist, and scientist Dr. Oliver Sacks, who died after a brave struggle with cancer on August 30, 2015, in New York City at the age of eighty-two. He wrote brilliantly right up to the end, and we are pleased to once again include one of his essays in this series, though, sadly, one of his last.
As always, I’m indebted to Nicole Angeloro for her keen editorial skills and uncanny ability to keep the annual express train running smoothly and on schedule. A special thanks to other publishing people with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt—Liz Duvall, Carla Gray, and Megan Wilson. I’m extremely grateful to Jonathan Franzen for agreeing to serve as guest editor and for contributing an introduction that is a must-read for anyone interested in the art of the essay. What he says about the essayist’s difficult embrace of risk and honesty can be felt throughout this exceptionally diverse and often emotionally turbulent collection.
