The Best

AMERICAN
ESSAYS ®

2010
Edited and with an Introduction
by Ch ri s to p h e r H i t c h en s

Robert Atwan, Series Editor

a mariner original
houghton mifflin harcourt
boston  •   new york 2010
Copyright © 2010 by Hough­ton Mif­flin Harcourt Publishing Company
Introduction copyright © 2010 by Christopher Hitchens
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“Who Killed Tolstoy?” from The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the
People Who Read Them, by Elif Batuman. Copyright ©  2010 by Elif Batuman. Re-
printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Originally published in
Harper’s, February 2009, under the title “The Murder of Leo Tolstoy.”
“The Bad Lion” by Toni Bentley. First published in the New York Review of Books,
November 5, 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Toni Bentley. Reprinted by permission of
Toni Bentley.
“The Dead Book” by Jane Churchon. First published in The Sun, February 2009.
Copyright © 2009 by Jane Churchon. Reprinted by permission of Jane Churchon.
“Irreconcilable Dissonance” by Brian Doyle. First published in Oregon Humani-
ties, Fall/Winter 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Brian Doyle. Reprinted by permission
of Brian Doyle.
“The Elegant Eyeball” by John Gamel. First published in Alaska Quarterly Review,
Spring/Summer 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Alaska Quarterly Review. Reprinted by
permission of Alaska Quarterly Review.
“How Einstein Divided America’s Jews” by Walter Isaacson. First published in the
Atlantic, December 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Walter Isaacson. Reprinted by per-
mission of Walter Isaacson. Excerpt from The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, by Al-
bert Einstein. Copyright © 1987–2008 Hebrew University and Prince­ton University
Press. Reprinted by permission of Prince­ton University Press.
“Lunching on Olympus” by Steven L. Isenberg. First published in the American
Scholar, Winter 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Steven L. Isenberg. Reprinted by permis-
sion of the author. Excerpt from “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” by W. H. Auden. Copy-
right © 1940 and copyright renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden, from Collected Poems by
W.  H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc. Excerpt from “Poem
About a Ball in the Nineteenth Century” by William Empson, from The Complete Po-
ems: William Empson, edited by John Haffenden (Allen Lane/The Penguin Press,
2000). Copyright © Estate of William Empson, 2000. Reproduced by permission of
Penguin Books Ltd. Excerpt from letter dated 28 June 1982 from Philip Larkin to
Christopher Ricks. Reprinted by permission of Marvell Press.
“Me, Myself, and I” by Jane Kramer. First published in The New Yorker, September
7, 2009. Copyright ©  2009 by Jane Kramer. Reprinted by permission of Jane
Kramer.
“When Writers Speak” by Arthur Krystal. First published in the New York Times
Book Review, September 27, 2009. Copyright © 2009 the New York Times. All rights
reserved. Used by permission and protected by the copyright laws of the United
States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of the Material with-
out express written permission is prohibited.
“A Rake’s Progress” by Matt Labash. First published in the Weekly Standard, Sep-
tember 7, 2009. Copyright ©  2009 by Matt Labash. Reprinted by permission of
The Weekly Standard.
“Brooklyn the Unknowable” by Phillip Lopate. First published in Harvard Review,
no. 37. Copyright ©  2009 by Phillip Lopate. Reprinted by permission of the au-
thor.
“On John Updike” by Ian McEwan. Previously published in the New York Review of
Books, March 12, 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Ian McEwan. Reprinted by permission
of Ian McEwan.
“My Genome, My Self” by Steven Pinker. First published in the New York Times
Magazine, January 11, 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Steven Pinker. Reprinted by per-
mission of Steven Pinker.
“Gyromancy” by Ron Rindo. First published in the Gettysburg Review, August
2009. Copyright ©  2009 by Ronald Rindo. Reprinted by permission of Ronald
Rindo.
“Guy Walks into a Bar Car” by David Sedaris. First published in The New Yorker,
April 20, 2009. Copyright ©  2009 by David Sedaris. Reprinted by permission of
­David Sedaris and Don Congdon Associates, Inc.
“Speaking in Tongues” by Zadie Smith. First published in the New York Review of
Books, February 26, 2009. From Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith,
copyright © 2009 by Zadie Smith. Used by permission of The Penguin Press, a divi-
sion of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Excerpts from “In Memory of My Feelings” from
The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara by Frank O’Hara, edited by Donald Allen. Copy-
right ©  1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith, Administratrix of the Estate of Frank
O’Hara, copyright renewed 1999 by Maureen O’Hara Granville-Smith and Donald
Allen. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
“Rediscovering Central Asia” by S. Frederick Starr. First published in Wilson
Quarterly, Summer 2009. Copyright © 2009 by S. Frederick Starr. Reprinted by per-
mission of the author.
“Gettysburg Regress” by John H. Summers. First published in the New Republic,
March 18, 2009. Copyright © 2009 by John H. Summers. Reprinted by permission
of John H. Summers.
“Fatheralong” by John Edgar Wideman. First published in Harper’s, August 2009.
Copyright ©  2009 by John Edgar Wideman, used with permission of The Wylie
Agency.
“Daredevil” by Garry Wills. First published in the Atlanic, July/August 2009.
Copyright © 2009 by Garry Wills, used with permission of The Wylie Agency. Re-
printed by permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC.
“A Fine Rage” by James Wood. First published in The New Yorker, April 13, 2009.
Copyright © 2009 by James Wood. Reprinted by permission of James Wood.
 Introduction

Unusually d isquali­f ied as I am for this high privilege and

responsibility (I never wanted to be an editor of anything; no, what
I really always wanted to be was . . . a scribbler), I have found ex-
traordinary pleas­ure in reading through the entries for this, the
quarter-centennial of the annual edition of the best essays pub-
lished in America.
The very word “essay,” which I first learned in the most boring of
its declensions — a school “composition” — has the power to thrill.
When I was very young I lived in a remote village on the edge of an
Eng­lish moorland. Every week, a mobile library would stop near
my house, and I would step up through the back door of a large
van to find its carpeted interior lined with bookshelves. Anything
one borrowed could be kept for seven days and then returned or
exchanged for fresh lendings. (If I live to see retirement, I would
quite like to be the driver of such a vehicle, bringing books to ea-
ger young readers like a Librarian in the Rye.) One day I took a
chance on a collection of science-fiction stories. One of these con-
cerned a weary teacher who picked up the scrawled “compositions”
of his class after the children had piled them on his desk, and
found at the bottom a letter from the future. Bound in luminous
green plastic, it was headed in oddly shaped characters: “An Essy.
By Jon Grom.” I was struck by this simple contrivance and also
found myself noticing, as if for the first time, that an “essay” is re-
ally a try, an attempt, even an adventure.
It also holds its meaning as a test, as in its cognate “assay” — which
is useful, since the assayer’s job is to tell base metals from true
Introduction xvii
gold — and as a trial, or a put­ting to the proof. One could also en-
fold it with the word “experiment,” as when Shakespeare in Sonnet
110 so ruefully says: “These blenches gave my heart another youth
/ And worse essays proved thee my best of love . . . Mine appetite I
never more will grind / On newer proof, to try an older friend.”
Allowance made for this grimmer version of an acid test or even an
arraignment, the jaunty original French word essai still connotes a
challenge, a good try, an effort, even a first draft (Gouverneur
Morris: “I have made an essay of a letter”). The resulting form is
agreeably provisional and elastic and invites one to take a chance
or, to borrow one of America’s most charming idioms, to give
something one’s best shot.
It’s necessarily arbitrary to subdivide these “tries,” but some main
subcategories would have to include the following. There is the
heuristic essay: an attempt to call attention to new information that
has been overlooked or ignored or even suppressed, or that per-
haps is simply deserving of a larger audience. Then — in no espe-
cial order — ­comes the polemical, or an attempt to persuade, or
refute, or explode and debunk, or to mobilize. One has to add the
confessional, in which the writer seeks to engage the reader in ei-
ther an apologia or a revelation, disburdening something (and
not, thank heavens, always with the aim of attracting sympathy).
No disgrace is the merely descriptive, where the writer paints a
scene in the hope of presenting it through his or her eyes. I would
want to add the revisionist to the heuristic: an article that ap-
proaches familiar material or common assumptions in a fresh light.
Then perhaps we could mention the conversational: something
composed for pleas­ure alone or for its own sake, where the “point”
is that there is no particular point. A coda is provided by the vale-
dictory, where the writer either bids adieu to someone else or tries
to do the near impossible and deliver some last words of his own
while the faculties are still intact.
Though the essay form probably originates with Michel de Mon-
taigne, I would still want to suggest that there is something about it
that conforms very well with the Anglo-American style. After all,
the United States itself — and even its very name, according to
some sources — is partly the outcome of the essayistic brilliance of
the radical Eng­lish artisan Thomas Paine. Somewhat like the word
“intellectual,” the word “essayist,” and its cousin “pamphleteer,”
 xviii Introduction
has a natural kinship with the idea of dissent. Or at least a kinship
with its most celebrated prac­ti­tioners, such as George Orwell — 
about whom somebody (James Wood this time) writes a decent es-
say almost ­every year. May this kinship flour­ish and bring forth
­numerous and vigorous descendants. And let us not neglect other
sturdy branches of the tradition, such as Lord Macaulay, and John
Maynard Keynes’s Essays in Persuasion, which go to show that this
outwardly slight form need not be ephemeral and may have his­
tory-altering consequences.
For all that, there are many slighter nonfictional subjects whose
proper treatment falls somewhere between the merely anecdotal
and the full-length. Perhaps I should already have mentioned the
travel piece, relating something from a locale that is (to us) exotic
while managing to phrase it in terms that are simultaneously famil-
iar. Elif Batuman’s excursion into the topography of classic Russian
literature made me envious because of its dry control over the far-
cical element and also because of its quiddity — an account of a
trip gone slightly awry would have been only a tenth as good if it
was about a less portentous subject. (She also made the absolute
most of an absence of evidence in order to mount a challenge to
the evidence of absence.) S. Frederick Starr’s learned plea for a
closer acquaintance with Central Asia, by contrast, relies not on a
traveler’s tale but on a distillation of many past travelers’ tales, urg-
ing a reconsideration of the area adjoining the near-magically
named Aral Sea as something far more than partibus infidelium.
The year 2009 was not an auspicious one for the American es-
say — or rather, it was not a healthy one for the sorts of magazines
that take the risk of publishing the essay form. Following closely on
the contraction of the advertising business and of the inflated
boom that had sustained it, publications slashed budgets and
pages, newsstand shelves were culled, and editors invited colum-
nists to con­trib­ute articles with an accent on brevity. Perhaps not
altogether a bad thing in itself in the long run, this meanwhile
helped call attention to the smaller magazines which Americans so
indefatigably continue to produce. (My colleague and series edi-
tor, the no-less-indefatigable Bob Atwan, continues to mine this re-
source with happy results.) I have been mightily impressed, paging
through the submissions and making the final selections, by the
staunch way in which publications like Missouri Review, Wilson Quar-
Introduction xix
terly, American Scholar, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Oregon Humani-
ties continue to trust authors to write at length, and readers to take
the trouble to repay that trust.
It was also a year in which some great prac­ti­tioners of the art
were lost to us, and appropriately memorialized. Ian McEwan on
John Updike and Garry Wills on William F. Buckley represent the
retrospective mode at its most skillful — principally in producing
with apparent ease what must have been quite exacting to write.
The first, though beautifully modulated, is somewhat love-love,
and the second makes up with true affection for a certain his­tory
of love-hate, but both perform the supreme of­fice of evoking the
still-echoing voices of their subjects and of doing so with care and
meas­ure.
Perhaps surprisingly, 2009 was not an especially good year for
the polemical. Possibly it was felt that the inauguration of a new
president would or perhaps should see an end to a dec­ade of ran-
cor and “partisanship,” in which case my strong suspicion — and
devout hope — is that this was only a twelvemonth of a very brief
truce. Even Matt Labash of the vigorously combative Weekly Stan-
dard found himself looking for a human pulse in one of Washing-
ton’s notorious rogue fig­ures — albeit a fallen one. The polemical
element of the essayist’s craft is an essential one: the element that
sounds an alarm or calls attention to an injustice or explodes an
inflated reputation. John Edgar Wideman’s terse and eloquent
piece on the background of the Emmett Till murder struck me as
exemplary in this respect, not just because its sense of outrage was
so well mobilized but because it taught me several things about a
famous episode that I felt indignant with myself at not having
known before. Walter Isaacson’s reconstruction of a neglected epi-
sode in the life of Albert Einstein and American Jewry was another
instance — in this case heuristic rather than polemical — of a his-
torical controversy with continuing relevance to the present day
and the origins of its discontents. Combining a sense of his­tory
with a feeling for the environment is John Summers’s protest
against the denaturing and pseudo-domestication of the Repub-
lic’s nearest approximation to hallowed ground.
In my own case the inner urge to write an article is usually con-
nected to the desire to inform or to persuade, and when I find my-
self writing about a general topic or for pleas­ure alone, it is almost
 xx Introduction
always because somebody else has had the idea for me. Has asked
me to “essay” something, in other words, or give something a try: I
am fortunate in having editors who can think of things for me to
do. Thus I have an inordinate admiration and envy for those who
can simply make amusing and enlightening prose out of their own
experience. (We continue to miss the lighthearted yet profound
work of George Plimpton — a man of whom it might be said that
he would essay anything once — in this vineyard.) It was a happy
day for me when my ­younger daughter introduced me to the writ-
ing of David Sedaris, and ended up by causing me to wish I could
meet “Hugh” as well (the inauguration of their relationship is ac­
tually curtain-raised here). The steady development of the individ-
ual voice of Zadie Smith has been something to notice ­every year
for several years.
About a dec­ade ago, I published a plea for fiction and nonfic-
tion writers to come up to the new levels of language and meta-
phor that have been set for us by the extraordinary pace and
rhythm of two sci­en­tific revolutions. The first of these — the micro,
so to speak — has been the unraveling of the skein of our DNA,
showing among other things our genetic relationship with our fel-
low animals but also demonstrating the material basis for consider-
ing the evolved human species as one. The second — the macro — is
the almost exponential manner, from the Big Bang to the Hubble
redshift, in which physics has been both elucidating the origins of
our cosmos and mapping the path to its, and our, eventual extinc-
tion. One or two novelists have tried to raise and re­fine language
to the point where it recognizes and engages with this new impera-
tive (Richard Powers being one and Ian McEwan being another),
and some sci­en­tific popularizers have also taken on the hard re-
sponsibility, but so far the micro dimension has been largely the
province of specialists. So it was a special pleas­ure to read Steven
Pinker’s account — at once entertaining and instructive — of the
humanistic implications of the genomic. One must hope that this
is only the beginning of a new kind of writing on this and kindred
subjects, because one of the first principles of essayism is that the
proper study of mankind is man.
As one who tries to teach the essay as well as to write it, I hear my
share of collegial complaints about the short attention span of the
young, the sharp decline of print, the randomness and promiscuity
Introduction xxi
of electronic media, and the prevalence of instant and even gram-
marless or punctuation-free idioms. This is the familiar complaint,
or so I suspect, of ­every generation that bemoans the decline of
standards in the rising one. Yet working with David Eggers, say, on
his Valencia Street proj­ect, or witnessing the enviably long and ea-
ger lines for a David Sedaris reading, I feel relatively con­fi­dent that
neither the demand for nor the supply of the well-wrought feuil-
leton will ever become exhausted. We are not likely to reach a time
when the need of such things as curiosity, irony, debunking, dispu-
tation, and elegy will become sat­is­fied. For the present, we must
resolve to essay, essay, and essay again.
Ch ristopher Hitchens