Reading Essays: An Invitation (review)

Most of us who teach the essay outside of first-year composition have noticed the dearth of serious, scholarly writing about the form. Sure, there’s the second half of Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story, and Phillip Lopate’s introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay, and—of course—Theodor Adorno’s seminal piece “The Essay as Form.” But those who teach creative nonfiction classes at the graduate or advanced undergraduate levels have looked high and low for a text that explores the history and conventions of the form in specific detail, using language that’s accessible to students without talking down to them, and we’ve frequently wound up empty-handed, or scrounging together a course reader featuring selections from a variety of sources.

So when G. Douglas Atkins says in the introduction to his new book Reading Essays: An Invitation, “Nothing has yet emerged to parallel such determinative texts as the now-legendary Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction, nor have teachers and commentators yet been swift to offer ‘readings’ of individual essays, thus to assist students and faculty alike in the burgeoning courses in the essay,” we understand that this is true: this book is unique in its sense of scope. Atkins has devoted 276 pages to discussing 24 essayists writing in both Montaigne’s “personal” and Bacon’s “familiar” traditions, covering centuries of writing, and demonstrating thematic relationships among essayists over several generations.

Atkins’s voice in this book is that of an opinionated and engaging expert, which seems appropriate, as he argues that

The voice [in a successful essay] works, I am tempted to conclude, because the reader cannot but like the person. Rather than a tautology, this points to the fact that, in essays, not only must the voice engage, but also the essay’s truth must come to reside in that character, the person of the essayist.

[emphasis Atkins’s]

He would no doubt object to my use of the term “creative nonfiction” in the first paragraph of this review—the term is, according to Atkins, a “rather unfortunate current designation.” But if he occasionally strikes the reader as somewhat contrary (as when he insists that Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” is not, strictly speaking, an essay), it’s because his book’s chapters are, in fact, examples of the very form he’s writing about. These essays on essays seem written as an invitation into a conversation, not as a manifesto.

This notion of conversation is important. The ideal reader of an essay, Atkins tells us, has a lot in common with a well-mannered conversationalist. The reader must approach an essay in a spirit of “sympathetic engagement,” with a willingness to consider the essayist’s point of view, though such sympathy “cannot, and must not, mean separation from evaluation and judgment.” Atkins suggests that much literary theory—with its preconceived notions and political agendas—has been inadequate to the task of discussing essays. In his chapter on Virginia Woolf, Atkins even argues that Woolf’s “common reader of 1925” was at least as educated as “today’s critic or scholar, whose narrowness has been too well documented—and displayed—to require elaboration.”

Atkins risks alienating readers with his own contrariness, as surely as Henry David Thoreau or Zora Neale Hurston did when they pointed out others’ lives of quiet desperation, or specious claims to Native American bloodlines; but in the end, his opinions—bluntly stated as they are—never quite alienate, because his voice radiates such authority and goodwill. I don’t agree with his assessment of the work some of my colleagues perform, but I can at least enjoy his candor as he expresses his own criticisms of that work and appreciate that he has arrived at his conclusions honestly, after a great deal of reflection. Put another way, essayists (and conversationalists) approaching a topic in good faith can certainly find ways to disagree agreeably.

Atkins also does a commendable job of placing the essayists he discusses...