The Contemporary American Essay, edited by Phillip Lopate

The Contemporary American Essay
Edited by Phillip Lopate
Anchor Books, 2021

It always provokes a tremor in the knees, the appearance of that word “contemporary.” Whether it’s attached to dance or art or poetry or cinema, it usually signals one thing: debauchery. Countless are the people since the dawn of the 20th century who’ve used the word “contemporary” as a cloak drawn over irreverence, irrelevance, or incompetence. The shield works perfectly; if somebody dislikes something you’re describing as “contemporary,” that somebody must be a hidebound reactionary, timid and inflexible, right? 

So it’s cause for a bit of concern when the word appears in Phillip Lopate’s new book, The Contemporary American Essay, the third and final volume in his three-book look at the American essay since its inception. The first two volumes, The Glorious American Essay and The Golden Age of the American Essay, charted the origin and flourishing of the form, and neither of those volumes could very much dare the kind of tipsy daring that the word “contemporary” often provokes in ordinarily sensible editors. There’ve been many, many American essay collections over the years, and they’re necessarily more alike than different. There are figures - even specific works - that you pretty much can’t leave out without making the omission the only thing anybody talks about. 

Lopate is a fantastic editor, savvy and elaborately well-read. His The Art of the Personal Essay is a seminal collection, and the first two volumes in this trilogy are no less enjoyable for being largely predictable. It’s only with this third volume and the advent of that word “contemporary” that doubt begins to creep in. When Lopate describes the 21st century moment as a “deeply unsure and divided age,” even the staunchest of readers may begin to expect the worst.

The age is unsure and divided, true, but so are all others, and no amount of unsure and divided is going to change an essay into a bird bath or a bird bath into an essay. Emerson might have opined “Let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law,” but he could be a bit of a loon - even in the age of Twitter, trifles remain trifles. And an essay remains, as the Christian Science Monitor’s critic put it, “a literary set of ruminations that can be read in one sitting.” 

That knife carves away some of Lopate’s choices for this latest volume. Obvious short stories like Meghan Daum’s “Matricide” or Charles D’Ambrosio’s “Loitering” are included here one what can be assumed to be a lark, for instance. Ander Monson’s incoherent “Failure: A Meditation” is here, as is Floyd Skloot’s “Gray Area: Thinking with a Damaged Brain,” which is moving in inverse proportion to the likelihood that it could have been written by somebody who’d actually experienced any of the maladies it describes. “Dear Friend, From My Life I Write To You in Your Life,” in which Yiyun Li assembles 24 random anecdotes, is likewise here for no apparent reason. 

But given the egregious crimes usually committed under that “contemporary” banner, such inclusions total only a small fraction of the Table of Contents here, which is otherwise every bit as strong as those in all other Lopate’s anthologies, with superb pieces like Leslie Jamison’s “The Empathy Exams,” or Patricia Hampl’s “Other People’s Secrets,” which ruminates wonderfully on the nature of personal journals. “There is no more private kind of writing,” she observes. “The journal teeters on the edge of literature. It plays the game of having its cake and eating it too: writing which is not meant to be read.” True, there’s typically self-impressed gibberish from David Shields (“Information Sickness,” in this case), but there’s also Darryl Pinckney’s terrific “Busted in New York,” Samantha Irby’s “The Terror of Love,” and Lynn Freed’s raucous “Doing No Harm: Some Thoughts on Reading and Writing in the Age of Umbrage.” 

“The essay has always been an adaptable, plastic, shape-shifting form,” Lopate writes, the scamp. “It may take the form of meditation, reportage, blog, humor piece, eulogy, autobiographical slice, diatribe, list, collage, mosaic, lecture, or letter.” It’s worth pointing out: it may not. But in the presence of such well-chosen abundance - and, let’s remember, such a magnificent trilogy - allowances are easy. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.