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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

‘Essays’ Reads Like A Real Book

Steve Metcalf The Hartford Courant

“The Best American Essays 1996,” by Geoffrey C. Ward with Robert Atwan (Houghton Mifflin, $27, $12.95 paperback, 370 pp.)

For openers, this year’s “Best American Essays” collection is noticeably less smark-alecky than recent editions.

Whether this reflects a change in the “zeitgeist,” or just the sensibilities of this year’s guest editor, Geoffrey Ward, isn’t clear.

Maybe it’s just that this is the 10th anniversary of the series and everybody wanted to put their best foot forward. In any event, it’s a collection that feels like a real book, rather than a dutiful annual.

There’s the expected range of ethnicity and gender, in terms of authorship and subject matter, but it doesn’t feel forced.

There’s also the welcome chance to remind yourself of all the worthy periodicals out there that you never see. And of the writers, celebrated and unknown, who are out there, knocking out distinguished prose.

To wit:

William Styron’s richly clinical, yet surprisingly entertaining account of how he responded to a youthful diagnosis of syphilis.

This is a delicate topic, of course, and in lesser hands could have devolved into yet another swaggering sexual memoir, a subgenre that has been gaining popularity.

But perhaps because Styron had relatively little to swagger about - even measured by the more challenging sexual standards of the ‘40s - the piece reads like the chastened recollection of a genuinely surprised and, in several senses, stricken young man.

Plus, it features that time-honored device that’s all too rare in modern essays - the surprise ending.

Ian Frazier’s celebration - a little pat but nice - of his melting pot neighborhood in Brooklyn. Since Frazier is a master of the drolly comic, it takes a few paragraphs to determine that this is straight-ahead, on-the-level prose. But once this is established, it’s a pleasant ride.

An unsettling reminiscence (“They All Just Went Away”) by Joyce Carol Oates, in which the author recalls her childhood habit of entering and exploring abandoned houses near her family’s farmhouse in rural Western New York State.

The child wanders in and out of these empty and ruined structures, ruminating as she goes:

“The house contains the home but is not identical with it. The house anticipates the home and will very likely survive it, reverting again simply to house when home (that is, life) departs. For only where there is life can there be home.”

Or as the poet said, somewhat less poetically, it takes a heap o’ livin’ to make a house a home.

Stanley Crouch’s concise, withering analysis of the Michael Jackson phenomenon, in which the self-created King of Pop is seen as perpetrator and victim of the excesses of the truly soulless entertainment business.

A wise and affectionate study, by Joan Acocella, of Willa Cather and specifically Cather’s complicated standing within the critical establishment.

Acocella’s blend of scholarship and humane common sense, much of it questioning Cather’s putative lesbianism, is courageous and convincing.

Gerald Early’s brilliant “Understanding Afrocentrism: Why Blacks Dream of a World Without Whites,” which should be read by all Americans, and perhaps especially young people.

There are a few duds. Among them:

An unwarrantedly self-impressed piece called “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Elvis” by Julie Baumgold. Baumgold seems to be unaware that the days are past when a writer can simply invoke poor, dead Elvis as a way of reaping some easy laughs about the weirdness and junkiness of popular culture.

Also, it’s old stuff, much of it. So besides the misdemeanor of unfunniness, the piece commits the felony of laziness.

Nicholson Baker’s exhaustive, and exhausting, meditation on the use of books as decorative accessories (“Books as Furniture”).

Baker bothers to ascertain the titles of volumes used in the background of print ads for Pottery Barn, The Company Store and Crate & Barrel. He’s more amused by this than we are.