On bad essay collections
For most of the last year, most of the last several years, really, I have wanted to write an essay collection. As a consequence, I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about what I want my essays to be, reading and re-reading essay collections, and doing a lot of thinking about the form.
This week I finished two collections I’ve been slowly pottering through for the last couple of months: Not A Novel by Jenny Erpenbeck, and Halls of Fame by John D’Agata. I felt ashamed at not having read Halls of Fame before now, given that his ideas about the essay and creative non-fiction in the three-volume Next American Essay series have been hugely important to how I think about writing (a very good précis of the project is written about by David Ulin here). D’Agata’s own essay collection is a perfect example of what I think essay collections can be, and should do. Like short story collections, they work better as a whole when there’s an over-riding theme and concept, not just slip-shod pieces bound together without any relation to one another. D’Agata’s essays are formally challenging and they ask you to think about what art is, and what truth is (although I suppose there’s a reason I had to read it over several months, the essays are dense and reward re-reading).
But the Jenny Erpenbeck book has made me cross about a thing I feel increasingly cross about. It is very common for publishers to churn out a book by an over-performing writer and say that it’s an essay collection. Zadie Smith, Geoff Dyer, Coetzee. These are essentially a collection of magazine articles, lectures, and pre-book-publication publicity pieces. They are thrown into a book, and sometimes they sell well, and sometimes they don’t. These books are not interested in the form of the essay or the essay collection itself, and I find them deeply annoying.
Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck is one of the best books I’ve read in the last year, and I was very excited when I saw an essay collection was being published, hoping that it would be an intentional essay collection, for want of a better descriptor. I wanted to see what she did with the form. But it wasn’t what I hoped. It was a series of magazine pieces, op-eds, lectures, acceptance speeches, with a Preface that tries to make them all cohere into something deliberate, but can’t make them.
It doesn’t mean I didn’t find anything to love in the book. The pieces collected under the subheading ‘Life’ were lovely. They resonated with me because of where I am in my life right now (V often points out that we are people who, before this year, lived our lives depending on the happy magnanimity of open borders). Erpenbeck writes about growing up in East Berlin and experiencing the fall of the Wall. She writes about a kind of ghost city that exists here, for her more than me: “When I was a child, one half of the city seemed like a whole to me. Even today, although I understand that the city is finally functioning again as intended, by growth and by design, my feelings disagree. For instance, I can drive along Chausseestraße a hundred times, from the East Berlin neighbourhood of Mitte to the West Berlin neighbourhood of Wedding—by now it’s a perfectly normal street again—but every single time, a hundred times, I drive through a border crossing. The two parts have grown back together, but for me it isn’t a question of growing back together, instead it’s a completely arbitrary addition, since when I was a child I never experienced the two halves of Berlin as one city.” I’ve been in Berlin long enough now to know where she’s talking about (in Wedding, as it happens). One of the strangest things about where I’ve been living these last few months is that I go back and forth across the Berlin Wall just about every day. You can’t spend any length of time in Berlin without being constantly aware of the two former halves of the city. But as lovely as those pieces were, Not A Novel thereafter was comprised mostly of acceptance speeches and lecture notes, and I got frustrated. In the end I skimmed most of the lectures and speeches, because that’s all they were.
I don’t have patience for those kinds of books anymore. Earlier this year I was given an ARC of Olivia Laing’s book Funny Weather, an essay collection. I hadn’t made much of a start on it when the world fell apart, and ended up taking it with me when I got stranded in Australia. I have been of two minds about Olivia Laing for some time. She seems like somebody I ought to like, and I have dutifully read all of her books published before now. But I so often disagree with her conclusions, take offence at her messy thinking. We like the same things, more or less. Not that an interest in New Narrative or David Wojnarowicz or John Berryman amounts to much of anything. But an acknowledgment of those shared interests has made me go back to her writing, not allowing myself to give up just yet, even when I’ve rolled my eyes. (Last week Dilara O’Neil wrote an excellent piece for The Nation on Laing’s essays, which nails my general problems with all of her writing: “Laing would rather overemphasize the politics of the personal than account for her own lack of solidarity with forces of meaningful reform. The problem is that you can’t.”)
Funny Weather is an example not just of Laing’s messy and simplistic thinking dressed up as political radicalism, but it’s also just a poor collection. They are pieces written for magazines and newspapers, a kitchen-drawer tangle of her thoughts and interests, with no cohesion, no central premise, and no business being a ‘collection.’ Recently I finished Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told, a selection of Jenny Diski’s essays (Laing married Diski’s husband after Diski died, which is a fun piece of gossip). While Diski’s collection is selected from pieces published in the London Review of Books over several decades, the book make me cross in the way I’ve been talking about. It has been edited well, the pieces are compiled intentionally, and they do not feel rushed-out to an editor who’s requested them on commission, they do not feel half-baked. Jenny Diski was the far better writer, the far better thinker, and the pleasure of reading her essays casts Funny Weather in a very grim light. When I realized how little effort had been put into the book, I allowed myself to give up on it. There was a Little Free Library box installed on the fence of a house on Govett’s Leap Road in Blackheath, and I took the Laing along with several other books I had given up on, and left them in there.
Letting go of Funny Weather and allowing myself to get cross with unintentional essay collections, like Erpenbeck’s, makes me appreciate all the more the essay collections which made me fall in love with the genre: Notes From No-Man’s Land, Where I Was From, The Empathy Exams, White Girls, My 1980s. Two of the best books I read this year have been essay collections: Blueberries by Ellena Savage, and Surfacing by Kathleen Jamie. They are gleaming gems, these books, beautiful, and those are the books that make me excited to write essays again.
Book Mentioned:
Halls Of Fame - John D’Agata (US)
The Next American Essay - edited by John D’Agata (US, UK)
Visitation - Jenny Erpenbeck (US, UK, AU)
Not A Novel - Jenny Erpenbeck (US, UK, AU)
Funny Weather - Olivia Laing (US, UK, AU)
Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? - Jenny Diski (US, UK, AU)
Notes From No-Man’s Land - Eula Biss (US, UK)
Where I Was From - Joan Didion (US, UK, AU)
The Empathy Exams - Leslie Jamison (US, UK, AU)
White Girls - Hilton Als (US, UK, AU)
My 1980s - Wayne Koestenbaum (US)
Blueberries - Ellena Savage (US, UK, AU)
Surfacing - Kathleen Jamie (US, UK, AU)
What I’ve been reading lately:
The Rings of Saturn - W.G. Sebald (re-read) (US, UK, AU)
The Border - Erika Fatland (US, UK, AU)
Weather - Jenny Offill (US, UK, AU)
She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs - Sarah Smarsh (US)
What I’m looking forward to:
Under A White Sky - Elizabeth Kolbert (US)
Gigantic Cinema: A Weather Anthology - edited by Alice Oswald (UK)
Gay Bar - Jeremy Atherton Lin (US, UK)
Something to look at:
— ‘John’ from Not A Novel, by Jenny Erpenbeck
News: The Inland Sea was included on January’s IndieNext list. I am very grateful to everyone who nominated my weird, bleak, little book.