From: eye2@interlog.com (eye WEEKLY)
Newsgroups: eye.news,rec.arts.books.reviews,alt.books.reviews
Subject: BOOKS: The Art Of The Personal Essay
Date: 16 Aug 1995 20:19:54 -0400


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eye WEEKLY                                              August 17 1995
Toronto's arts newspaper                      .....free every Thursday
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BOOKS                                                            BOOKS

                    THE ART OF THE PERSONAL ESSAY
           Selected with an introduction by Phillip Lopate
                    Anchor/Doubleday, $22.95 paper

                                  by
                         ALEXANDER FINLAYSON

The novel and the poem, in the minds of readers and academics, are the 
serious literary forms. The essay? It doesn't count.

Its image has not been helped by the justifiably frequent complaint 
that essay anthologies are just collections of literary guest-spots. 
How often have you opened a collection to find the contents comprise 
the off-cuts and bog-jottings of writers who made their names writing 
something other than essays?

In his introduction, Phillip Lopate feels compelled to make the 
standard plea that the essay should be considered serious art. It 
comes with the territory, I suppose, but on evidence he doesn't really 
need to make it. There are literary greats here from antiquity to the 
present, but the material (in this age of personality-driven 
literature) makes you look past the names.

Each essay is about something we all want to know about: the secrets 
of successful self-justification; the cycle of dependency known as 
"stylized enjoyment" (that is, how many dinner parties have you been 
to where this phrase would best describe your evening there); the 
pleasures of hating; and why no one in their right mind would take up 
a literary career.

Then there is the contentious stuff: why leaving the cinema is the 
best part of the movie-going experience; how people who can't abide 
noise are of unstable mind; and how the frontier spirit, so coded into 
the North American brain, leaves millions of people without any idea 
what they want to do in life.

The essay is eternally modern, conversational and cheeky -- which may 
explain why it remains outside the playroom of literature. It is 
plainly enjoying a revival at a time when other genres have become 
hidebound by their own conventions.

What makes Lopate's set of essays such a breath of fresh air is their 
lack of artifice, their pure unliterariness. Take the piece by the 
Italian Natalia Ginzburg. Ginzburg writes like a child. She describes 
her own character, and that of her husband, in the sing-song way of a 
5-year-old. He makes her feel like a mouse. As simple sentence builds 
upon simple sentence, we see a portrait develop of the way a marriage 
of unequal parts actually works. It's as sophisticated and 
"unfinished" as the best of fiction, and as memorable.

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