The Next American Essay (review)

A few days before I received my review copy of The Next American Essay, a student in my graduate nonfiction workshop asked me to recommend some experimental creative nonfiction books. He'd already read essays by such writers as Karen Brennan, James Alan McPherson, and Bernard Cooper. He'd read Double Down by Frederick and Steven Barthelme. What more did he want? I told him that by its very nature all creative nonfiction is experimental.

He sighed audibly. "You know," he said. "Something edgy." I recommended a few writers who seemed edgy to me, among them Joseph Brodsky, Kathryn Harrison, J. M. Coetzee. My student shook his head. "Who's the David Foster Wallace of creative nonfiction?" he asked.

According to John D'Agata's new anthology, The Next American Essay, David Foster Wallace himself is the David Foster Wallace of creative nonfiction. Or one of them, at least. And Wallace's essay "Ticket to the Fair," which originally appeared in his book A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, is one of the most engaging in the collection. In voice and manner it reads rather like the now-old New Journalism. Not as Gonzo as Tom Wolfe or Hunter Thompson, not as contemplative as Joan Didion, but skeptical and ironic about the story he's been assigned to cover: the 1993 Illinois State Fair. Immediately, Wallace lets you know his take on the whole enterprise: "I suspect that every so often editors at East Coast magazines slap their foreheads and remember that about 90 percent of the United States lies between the coasts, and figure they'll engage somebody to do pith-helmeted anthropological reporting on something rural and heart-landish."

Though it's his first visit to the fair, as a native of Illinois Wallace recognizes from the "forehead-tighteningly hot" morning that "noon will be a kiln." He pillories the food, the Junior Livestock Center, the music, the carnies, the sheep, cloggers, tourists, sprint car races, the weather, the bathrooms—even the walkways ("a Saint Vitus' dance of blacktop"). The vast landscape of the rural Midwest, he notes, leaves people marooned and empty. Land is a commodity, a factory, and "you live in the same factory you work in." Even prize horses in the livestock venues become almost surreal under Wallace's gaze. Their eyes are "apple-sized" and "set on the sides of their heads, like fish." Their "faces are long and somehow suggestive of coffins." Naturally, the cows and swine come off even worse. Then he turns that harsh eye on himself—and by association, species-wise—on the reader as well by observing that the owners see their stock not "as pets or friends" but only as products that "continue to drool and smell and scream."Wallace realizes what farmers must think of visitors: "We tourists get to indulge our tender animal-rights feelings with our tummies full of bacon."

D'Agata's vision of what's next for the American essay is not entirely such high irony and journalism. He is interested in the very variousness of the form. To be sure, postmodernism is a feature of the book, and in addition to the Wallace essay, D'Agata includes such works as David Antin's "The Theory and Practice of Postmodernism: A Manifesto" and Carole Maso's "The Intercession of the Saints." But he also includes such often-anthologized writers as Barry Lopez, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, and Annie Dillard. As an editor of Seneca Review, and as an essayist in his own right (Halls of Fame), D'Agata has long been a proponent of what he calls "lyric essays," and while he includes many essays here that might count as lyric (focused on imagination, image, and the rapid movement of the mind), the book does not overly press that approach. Still, he pushes against formal boundaries. He's included Jamaica Kincaid's...