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| V V: The best American essays | |
| V V / New Delhi July 04, 2009, 0:20 IST | |
Essays come in all shapes and many sizes. But however large the canvas, their distinguishing marks are intimacy and informality. They are rather like talking on paper, unhampered by preconceived notions of order and regularity, what Dr Johnson described as “a loose sally of the mind.” Probably this is what makes them so readable and the best of them in recent times originate in America—unconstrained, independent in their tastes, “a mixed genre without being a mixed up one,” as Adam Gopnik says in his Introduction to The Best American Essays, 2008 (Houghton Mifflin, $28).
The essayist’s end, Gopnik says, “is achieved not so much by argument as by asserting the facts of actual experience,” but he goes on to warn, quoting Montaigne, the inventor of the modern essay, “we are, I know not how, double within ourselves, with the result we do not believe what we believe, and we cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.” Because of these contradictions, what Montaigne insisted on was not just of doubt, not just an uncertainty about who’s right but whether being right is worth all the pain it causes. Modern essayists make doubt or comic doubt the underlying central theme of their writings. Hence their enduring relevance in uncertain times.
There are three kinds of modern essays and each grafts the essay into another genre: there are review essays, memoir essays and the odd-object essay. The review essay is the most common: the memoir essay takes the form of reminiscence, the personal anecdote, a story, What Happened to Me Once, but it sets itself off from the memoir by adding a reflection or at least the ghost of a moral at the end; the odd object takes a small, specific object but finds a way to a larger point and an entirely different subject. Simply, an essay has to be a hybrid to be durable. All three types are represented in the 21 essays here, which were first published in various literary magazines before they ended up in this anthology, an annual feature since 1986.
Begin with Dr Atul Gawande’s “The Way We Age Now”. (Gawande is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, the general surgeon at a hospital in Boston and writer of two bestsellers, Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science and Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, apart from numerous articles in the New Yorker, many of which have been anthologised in some book or the other.) In this essay, Gawande examines the entire ageing process, beginning with tooth decay and going on to the rest of the anatomy.
But why do we age in the first place? “There is no single common cellular mechanism to the ageing process...we just fall apart” in a bewildering array of ways till we end up in the geriatric ward. Dr Gawande makes a strong case for strengthening geriatric clinics, with case studies thrown in, which are rapidly losing doctors because it is an area that doesn’t bring in much money. There isn’t much that can done about this, but the sad part is that “most of us in medicine don’t know how to think about decline. We’re good at addressing specific, individual problems: colon cancer, high blood pressure, arthritic knees…and various other ailments” but when it comes to ageing, doctors themselves don’t know how to handle the inevitable decline and the problems that come with it. Dr Gawande has provided a critique of modern medicine and this essay, like his earlier writings, is a reminder not to take all that medicine claims at face value.
Louis Menand’s “Notable Quotables” is a lesson on how often quotations are misquoted simply because the misquotes are used so often that they get accepted as the original saying. For instance, Sherlock Holmes never said, “Elementary, my dear Watson,” what he said, “Excellent!” I cried. “Elementary,” said he. Neither Ingrid Bergman nor anyone else in Casablanca said: “Play it again, Sam.” What she said was, “Play it Sam. Play As Time Goes By.” Similarly, many phrases for which Churchill is famous, he adapted from the phrases of other people (for instance, ‘Iron Curtain’ which was first used by Goebbels). When Yogi Berra, the American baseball player said, “I didn’t really say everything I said,” he was speaking for a whole lot of others who pick up phrases from others and embellish them as their own.
Anthologies have one great advantage: their variety, the promise of containing something for every reader, dipping into them, backwards or forwards, you can put it down and come back to it afresh. Very few books these days are read from cover to cover in one go; you take it in bits and pieces, which is what this collection of essays allows you to do.
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