Dillon on Koestenbaum

In the Guardian, Brian Dillon reviews Wayne Koestenbaum's book, "Humiliation," which he calls "an eloquent, fearless and frequently hilarious essay on the 'whimpering beast inside each of us', and on the urge to exploit its vulnerability." Incidentally, "Humiliation" in the UK is published by "the home of the essay," Notting Hill Editions.

Errol Morris and W.G. Sebald

The documentary-maker Errol Morris's book, "Believing Is Seeing (Observations of the Mysteries of Photography)," has been getting on quite a few Best of 2011 book lists, including those of The New York Times and The Washington Post. It does sound like an interesting project, and it is always good to see examples of the chronicle's close cousin, the essay, do well in the marketplace. But, to judge by a few excerpts from it, the New York Times reviewer went a little overboard when he stated that "Morris's book feels less like traditional photography criticism than like the novels of W. G. Sebald, which are similarly obsessed with truth, memory and war." It would indeed be like Sebald -- if Sebald were the sort of writer who cared as little about the art of prose as someone who is principally a filmmaker. Morris's talky writing does not rise above the standard of your average newspaper column or blog.

John Jeremiah Sullivan, James Wood and What We Talk About When We Talk About Essays

Reissuing a piece of magazine journalism in book form and calling it an essay adds literary cachet to it, making it seem indeed worthy of a place between book covers. I've noted this happening in the case of Joan Didion and now it's happening with John Jeremiah Sullivan and his book,"Pulphead."

I admit that I have not read Sullivan's book yet, but I suspect that although it is sub-titled "Essays," most of the magazine stories collected in it did not appear under that rubric in GQ and wherever else they were published. The pieces most often mentioned by reviewers do sound like they are indeed magazine stories -- i.e. narratives based on reportage.

An essay is, by definition, not a story, not a narrative. And if Sullivan's pieces do contain strong essayistic elements in them,and you do not wish to call them simply magazine stories, then you would have to call them chronicles. When a narrative turns essayistic, or an essay turns narrative, what you are reallly talking about is a chronicle.

Still, "essays" were what Sullivan or his publisher chose to call his pieces, and in I way I find this encouraging. It could mean that publishers have begun to realize that essays are not sales poison. Not too long ago, the conventional wisdom in publishing was that essays rated beneath even short stories among genres to be avoided.

Perhaps publishers have cottoned onto the fact that essays do indeed have literary cachet, so much so as to lead even an eminent literary critic like James Wood of the New Yorker to review Sullivan's magazine pieces as though they were indeed examples of the literary essay. (Of course, in getting the God-obsessed Wood's attention, it must have helped that one of Sullivan's stories was about a Christian rock concert.) Which works out to be unintentionally funny at times, because Wood seems unaware that many of the story-telling strategies that he remarks in Sullivan, including what he calls "the postmodernity" of showing us a story's workings, have long been hackneyed ploys in magazine writing (though I'm sure Sullivan is talented enough to have freshened them up a bit.)

Still, I would like to believe that Wood is correct when he writes in this review: "The contemporary essay has for some time now been gaining energy as an escape from, or rival to, the perceived conservatism of much mainstream fiction." Of course, when he talks about the contemporary essay he is really talking about the contemporary chronicle.

Pulphead: Essays
by John Jeremiah Sullivan

More on Joseph Roth

Having recently learned about Harry Mount and Notting Hill Editions (the Home of the Essay,) I explored their Web site to find that they publish a book about the great chronicler Joseph Roth ("Wandering Jew: The Search for Joseph Roth," by Dennis Marks) which is in itself a chronicle. Though, of course, Notting Hill doesn't call it that. What does the publisher call it? Presumably, since Notting Hill is the home of the essay, it considers the book an essay, but the promotional blurb avoids the label -- perhaps because Harry Mount has stated that an essay has to be shortish, not book-length. So the blurb reads: "In this revealing ‘psycho-geography’[inverted commas not mine], Dennis Marks makes a journey through the eastern border­lands of Europe to uncover the truth about Roth’s lost world. The result is a riveting and involving documentary that reunites Roth with his creative and spiritual landscape."