Three Little Maids

The Best American Essays: 2007

I like to pick at least one of the Best American series each year, and every year I mistakenly believe from the title that I will be delighted. Everybody, including the editors and guest editors of the series, has his or her own definition of "best", and in most cases I disagree.

This is one of those cases. I found only two or three truly interesting essays in this collection of twenty or so, and most of them were not only uninteresting but also irritatingly written. Guest editor David Foster Wallace gives a clue to the reason when he writes of himself in the introduction, "As someone who has a lot of trouble being clear, concise and/or cogent, I tend to be allergic to academic writing . . ." This lack of clarity, concision and cogency, despite his professed efforts in the other direction, are reflected everywhere in his selections. It is as though he is not only incapable of writing clearly, but also of recognizing clarity in others and confusing it for lumpy rambling. This was compounded by his promise in the intro of a "brutal little treat" of an essay, hidden somewhere among the selections. That turn of phrase lulled me into an excited search for its referent, and up to the last essay, I hoped, "Maybe this is it . . ." It turned out to be either a sly editorial trick, or another misjudgment on Wallace's part.

The two exceptions to my irritation touched on confluent themes: Phillip Robertson's "In the Mosque of Imam Ali" and "Rules of Engagement" by Elaine Scarry. The former is a first-hand, though journalistic, account of the author's experience in and around Najaf during a siege by American troops and Moqtada Al Sadr's rather effective demagoguery. The latter is a riveting, though academic, iteration of the treachery of the United States government and military, even by its own standards. A pity that these were the main bright, though dark, spots in an otherwise unremarkable collection.

William Trevor: The Love Department

"'All this wretched love thing,' said Edward, 'Is it the cause of everything?'"(158). So questions Trevor throughout this remarkable novel. This early work of his accomplishes its goal far more effectively than his later, Death in Summer, a fact which leads me to prefer reading the similarly early The Children of Dynmouth for my next selection. In The Love Department, Trevor finds that Holy Grail of novelists, an inventive and curious conceit strong enough to carry an entire novel. The eponymous department is a Dear Abby-style service that takes the additional step of hunting down and thwarting the enemies of marital--and only marital--love. The chief offender is one Septimus Tuam, an itinerant gigolo who is responsible, not so much for the destruction of marriages, but for the wives' unhappinesses. The protagonist Edward, unhappy in his own right, is set upon this offender as a hapless agent of the department.

Through a series of well-constructed plot developments and whilst in the company of many memorable and believable characters, Edward comes to the realization that, as his boss had said, "We all set up a department of a kind". Indeed, the department develops into more than a literary device; it becomes an allegory of love itself. Everyone comes to his or her own amorous epiphanies, with the possible exception of Edward himself, a reminder that the messengers of love may not be meant for it themselves.

Apuleius: The Golden Ass

By means of Ward's Lifetime of Reading ( http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtward.html ) I have stumbled upon some lovable, profound works that I would never have read on my own. Never mind that Ward managed to get my to buckle down and read the Bible for real, or to chew my way through Tacitus, things about which I am less than humble. I am more grateful that he introduced me to the likes of Vaclav Havel, Maxim Gorky and Ondra Lysohorsky--none of which I would have been likely to read unsupervised. I add Apuleius to this list.

I expected something more along the lines of Ovid when I picked The Golden Ass (or Metamorphoses). I grinned heartily to find that it is a closer to a second century Harlequin Romance. Apuleius works his way progressively through the sexual vices, starting with normal--if animalistic--straight vaginal sex, through straight anal sex, gay anal sex, and ending with nothing short of bestiality. Along the way, he does that which I always say distinguishes mind-blowing literature from merely good books: he writes in such a way that the form of the book reflects the content. The "Back-and-forth fretwork of Fate", as the narrator puts it, is reflected in the back-and-forth narrative. It is no real trick that Apuleius takes the reader--roundaboutly--through stories within tales within narratives, including an account of Cupid and Psyche that is clearly the foundation for the story of Cinderella--the real one, not the Disney one. The translator does an admirable job of preserving Apuleius tricks of alliteration, cute word couplings, and other sly references to his meaning. I can't quite bring myself to label The Golden Ass MBL, but I give Apuleius just due for writing something trashy that still has wink of literariness.