This Year’s ‘Best Essays’ Could Be Better

“The Best American Essays 1995” Edited by Jamaica Kincaid with Robert Atwan (Houghton Mifflin, $24.95, $12.95 paperback, 263 pp.)

The yearly arrival of the “Best American Essays” has always been, for this unsystematic and disorganized reader, a happy event.

Like all “best of” compilations of anything, it carries the always-welcome promise of having already done the difficult legwork - the searching and finding - for me. Also, in this particular case, it has tended to be an occasion for singing the durability of the humble essay form and to marvel at its adaptability to modern themes.

Despite these predispositions, I found the 1995 installment to be often irritating and depressing.

My reasons are a little obscure, possibly a little arbitrary.

They have to do mainly with tone. Simply put, a high percentage of the items in this year’s collection have a swaggering, self-impressed, dancing-in-the-end-zone kind of feel.

I realize these very qualities will endear them to many readers.

But I find I miss, more than I might have predicted, the old-school mode: gently instructive, more or less tidily constructed, moderately self-deprecating.

These are not the terms one would use to describe, say, Joel Agee’s smart-alecky meditation (pompously titled “Eros at Sea”) on selected aspects of his sexual history, excessive both in detail and self-satisfaction. It suffers from a frat-boy’s mistaken sense that we’re interested.

Sexual confession, as it happens, is the theme in several of these pieces.

Dudley Clendinen’s short contribution, about attending a service for a man dying of AIDS, could have been a nice piece if the author had not felt moved to use it as an occasion for ruminating on his own admittedly nonstandard and confused sexual past.

Even Edward Hoagland, usually one of our most reliable if sometimes fussy practitioners, is represented by a piece that tells us much more than we want to know about his marital breakup and the sometimes nonorgasmic and frequently joyless-sounding union that preceded it.

What can be the reason people write like this? Is it that they think this is how The New Yorker wants them to write?

Ah, well. A few of this year’s specimens are satisfying, even measured by my exquisitely narrow and unforgiving yardstick:

Grace Paley’s tender memoir about spending six days in prison for taking part in a Vietnam War protest.

Maxine Kumin’s account of a year of working the earth in New Hampshire.

Edna O’Brien’s witty piece about the necessity of waiting.