The Best American Essays 2017 Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Introduction

  JASON ARMENT, Two Shallow Graves

  RACHEL KAADZI GHANSAH, The Weight of James Arthur Baldwin

  ELIESE COLETTE GOLDBACH, White Horse

  LAWRENCE JACKSON, The City That Bleeds

  RACHEL KUSHNER, “We Are Orphans Here”

  ALAN LIGHTMAN, What Came Before the Big Bang?

  EMILY MALONEY, Cost of Living

  GREG MARSHALL, If I Only Had a Leg

  BERNARD FARAI MATAMBO, Working the City

  KENNETH A. MCCLANE, Sparrow Needy

  CATHERINE VENABLE MOORE, The Book of the Dead

  WESLEY MORRIS, Last Taboo

  CHRISTOPHER NOTARNICOLA, Indigent Disposition

  MEGHAN O’GIEBLYN, Dispatch from Flyover Country

  KAREN PALMER, The Reader Is the Protagonist

  SARAH RESNICK, H.

  HEATHER SELLERS, Haywire

  ANDREA STUART, Travels in Pornland

  JUNE THUNDERSTORM, Revenge of the Mouthbreathers: A Smoker’s Manifesto

  ALIA VOLZ, Snakebit

  Contributors’ Notes

  Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction of 2016

  Notable Special Issues of 2016

  The Best American Series®

  About the Editors

  Connect with HMH

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 2017 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

  Introduction copyright © 2017 by Leslie Jamison

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  v1.0817

  “Two Shallow Graves” by Jason Arment. First published in the Florida Review, Summer 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Jason Arment. Reprinted by permission of Jason Arment.

  “The Weight of James Arthur Baldwin” by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah. From The Fire This Time, edited by Jesmyn Ward. Copyright © 2016 by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah. First published in BuzzFeed, February 29, 2016. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

  “White Horse” by Eliese Colette Goldbach. First published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Spring/Summer 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Eliese Colette Goldbach. Reprinted by permission of Eliese Colette Goldbach.

  “The City That Bleeds” by Lawrence Jackson. First published in Harper’s Magazine, July 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Lawrence Jackson. Reprinted by permission of Lawrence Jackson.

  “‘We Are Orphans Here’” by Rachel Kushner. First published in the New York Times Magazine, December 4, 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Rachel Kushner. Reprinted by permission of Writers House.

  “What Came Before the Big Bang?” by Alan Lightman. First published in Harper’s Magazine, January 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Alan Lightman. Reprinted by permission of Alan Lightman and Harper’s Magazine.

  “Cost of Living” by Emily Maloney. First published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Emily Maloney. Reprinted by permission of Emily Maloney.

  “If I Only Had a Leg” by Greg Marshall. First published in Electric Literature, November 18, 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Greg Marshall. Reprinted by permission of Greg Marshall.

  “Working the City” by Bernard Farai Matambo. First published in Transition, no.121. Copyright © 2016 by Bernard Farai Matambo. Reprinted by permission of Bernard Farai Matambo.

  “Sparrow Needy” by Kenneth A. McClane. First published in Kenyon Review, January/February 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Kenneth A. McClane. Reprinted by permission of Kenneth A. McClane.

  “The Book of the Dead” by Catherine Venable Moore. First published in Oxford American, Fall 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Catherine Venable Moore. Reprinted by permission of Catherine Venable Moore. Excerpts from “The Book of the Dead” by Muriel Rukeyser. Copyright © 1938 by Muriel Rukeyser. Reprinted with permission from ICM Partners.

  “Last Taboo” by Wesley Morris. From the New York Times Magazine, October 30, 2016. Copyright © 2016 by the New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the copyright laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.

  “Indigent Disposition” by Christopher Notarnicola. First published in North American Review, Winter 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Christopher Notarnicola. Reprinted by permission of Christopher Notarnicola.

  “Dispatch from Flyover Country” by Meghan O’Gieblyn. First published in the Threepenny Review, Summer 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Meghan O’Gieblyn. Reprinted by permission of Meghan O’Gieblyn.

  “The Reader Is the Protagonist” by Karen Palmer. First published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Karen Palmer. Reprinted by permission of Karen Palmer.

  “H.” by Sarah Resnick. First published in n+1, Winter 2016 (no. 24). Copyright © 2016 by Sarah Resnick. Reprinted by permission of Sarah Resnick.

  “Haywire” by Heather Sellers. First published in Tin House, no. 69. Copyright © 2016 by Heather Sellers. Used by permission of Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc. All rights reserved.

  “Travels in Pornland” by Andrea Stuart. First published in Granta, no. 136. Copyright © 2016 by Andrea Stuart. Reprinted by permission of Andrea Stuart.

  “Revenge of the Mouthbreathers: A Smoker’s Manifesto” by June Thunderstorm. First published as “Off Our Butts” in the Baffler, no. 33. Copyright © 2016 by June Thunderstorm. Reprinted by permission of June Thunderstorm.

  “Snakebit” by Alia Volz. First published in the Threepenny Review, Spring 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Alia Volz. Reprinted by permission of Alia Volz.

  Foreword

  The day I began this year’s foreword the news in my inbox reminded me that April 6, 2017, marked the one hundredth anniversary of America’s entry into World War I. The momentous decision to send U.S. troops came after years of hesitation and deliberation, and it was roundly applauded by those who thought an Allied victory (as Woodrow Wilson claimed) would make the world “safe for democracy”; H. G. Wells believed it would be the “war that will end war.” For the ill-prepared American conscripts, these noble ideals soon found themselves severely tested in the trenches of Flanders and Belleau Wood.

  Although most Americans rallied behind the declaration, vigorous antiwar protests left many communities across the nation divided. One of the most interesting voices opposi
ng U.S. entry into the war belonged to a young essayist who would die in the Great Influenza shortly after the Armistice, at the age of thirty-two. Randolph Bourne (1886–1918) remains one of the nation’s greatest advocates for peace, social justice, youth movements, labor, immigration, educational reform, and progressive values in general. The historian Christopher Lasch thought Bourne one of the earliest American writers to examine the intersections of culture and politics. Although his professional writing career covered barely eight years, Bourne’s literary output as an essayist was impressively prolific and often groundbreaking. In The Best American Essays of the Century, Joyce Carol Oates and I included Bourne’s “The Handicapped,” a moving account of his youthful struggles with two medical misfortunes: a grotesquely disfigured face caused by a “very messy birth” and severe physical disabilities resulting from the spinal tuberculosis he contracted at the age of four.

  Back when the word “activist” was still a neologism, Bourne demonstrated what the term actually meant and would mean in the future. As an undergraduate at Columbia, Bourne confessed getting into “trouble over some impassioned letters I wrote to the college daily protesting against the poor treatment of the scrub women, and the low ages of the children employed around the campus.” Like other universities, he argued, Columbia “does not hesitate to teach Social Ethics in the classroom and exploit its labor force on the side.”

  When America declared war, Bourne was shocked and devastated to see that many of his fellow intellectuals supported Wilson’s decision. He was especially disappointed that his mentor, the influential philosopher John Dewey, had also joined the pro-war ranks. In one of his major essays, “The War and the Intellectuals,” Bourne acutely describes how the nation’s intelligentsia and its elite eastern ruling class had surprisingly aligned themselves to persuade a skeptical and neutral public that going to war would promote the best interests of both American liberalism and international democracy. As he put it: “Only in a world where irony was dead could an intellectual class enter war at the head of such illiberal cohorts in the avowed cause of world-liberalism and world-democracy.”

  Bourne’s essay appeared in the New Republic for April 14, 1917. A regular contributor to that magazine, Bourne had broken ranks with numerous colleagues. The magazine’s editorial for that same issue praised America’s entry into the war as a “moral verdict reached after the utmost deliberation of the more thoughtful members of the community.” It should come as no surprise that Bourne’s reputation expanded decades later with the disasters brought on in Southeast Asia by the clique of White House advisers the late David Halberstam ironically termed “the best and the brightest.”

  A public dead to irony represented one of Bourne’s greatest fears. He strove to be not only a committed political thinker but a respected literary essayist. He did not perceive committed politics and a love of the essay as antithetical passions. But he did see the problems in reconciling the two; that is, how to fuse the essayist’s open-minded, irresolute, and skeptical disposition with the fervor and conviction that grow from a reformist desire to achieve better government and a more just society. As many writers know, something usually has to give—either we lose the intellectual skepticism or the impassioned resolution. Unlike the essayist, the advocate rarely tolerates contradictory opinions. As Cynthia Ozick put it in her introduction to the 1998 volume: “The essay is not meant for barricades; it is a stroll through someone’s mazy mind.” Although one needn’t accept such a dramatic distinction, Ozick succinctly reminds us of the traditional tension between the reflective and ruminative essay and polemical writing that seeks unqualified assent.

  Throughout his tragically brief career as an essayist, Bourne sought to reconcile his commitment to political activism and his love of literary aesthetics. He saw early on that a single intellectual capacity could unite the activist and the artist: irony. In a remarkable essay published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1913, the twenty-six-year-old Bourne set out a highly original philosophy of irony that stretches our understanding of the concept far beyond the standard rhetorical definition. In “The Life of Irony,” Bourne emphasizes that being ironical is much more than a matter of saying one thing and meaning another (as complicated at times as even that can get). He sees irony as much more than a rhetorical device or intellectual method. It is, instead, an entire way of life; the ironist, Bourne (perhaps punningly) claims, “is born and not made.”

  For Bourne, irony is the very soul of the essay, the source not only of a transcendent critical judgment but of personal self-discovery. “Not until I read the Socrates of Plato,” the youthful Bourne writes, “did I fully appreciate that this irony—this pleasant challenging of the world, this insistent judging of experience, this sense of vivid contrasts and incongruities, of comic juxtapositions, of flaring brilliances, and no less heartbreaking impossibilities, of all the little parts of one’s world being constantly set off against each other, and made intelligible only by being translated into and defined in each others’ terms—that this was a life, and a life of beauty, that one might suddenly discover one’s self living all unawares.”

  One can imagine a future Columbia student—one who grew up not far from Bourne’s Bloomfield, New Jersey—heartened by such words, though I can’t be sure he ever read them. Allen Ginsberg would transform Bourne’s transcendent irony into a powerful poetry that found no disconnect between political protest and literary aesthetics. Add to this Bourne’s seemingly paradoxical view that irony was both essential to empathy and an all-embracing democratic sensibility, and we come even closer to a vital connection between Bourne and the beat generation.

  Bourne’s ideas about irony and empathy may seem counterintuitive: after all, isn’t the ironist typically detached, sardonic, cynical, quick to ridicule? In “The Life of Irony” Bourne importantly distinguishes these lesser qualities from true irony, which brings us closer to the experience of others—not farther away. The inner mechanism works like this: because ironists readily adopt another’s point of view and make it their own, they come to live the other’s experiences with greater understanding and compassion. “Irony,” he says, “is thus the truest sympathy.” And this sympathy is inseparable from social criticism: “Things as they are, thrown against the background of things as they ought to be—this,” he claims, “is the ironist’s vision.” (For the greatest example of irony in the service of a political cause—an essay against colonial exploitation that makes the preposterous sound reasonable—readers are directed to Jonathan Swift’s masterpiece, “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public.”)

  Because ironists can’t resist applying irony to themselves, Bourne maintains, they will also be far less prone to egotism and self-esteem. Essayists since Montaigne have often relied on introspection as the most effective method of acquiring a self-understanding that leads to the understanding of others. For, as many still think, we know other minds only by analogy to our own. But Bourne refused to honor this essayistic legacy. When it came to self-understanding and self-interpretation, he wrote: “Introspection is no match for irony as a guide.” The dynamics of self-understanding, he suggests, move not inside out but rather outside in. Only from others do we learn how to interpret ourselves. “The ironist,” he proclaims, “is the only man who really gets outside of himself.”

  So, now a key question: How applicable is Bourne’s ironic perspective—or, for that matter, Swift’s, Twain’s, or even Orwell’s—to today’s political environment? Wouldn’t irony simply be lost in a Twitter-based discourse? Is it a distracting and irrelevant literary device, no substitute for chants, mantras, slogans, and sound bites, all designed to convey the absolute absence of ambiguous or ambivalent expression? Maybe Swift really was advocating that the children of Ireland’s poor be sold to the rich so they can be butchered for gourmet food. Isn’t that how the essay reads? Who can risk irony if the politi
cal message might get distorted or complicated? Or the writer or speaker mislabeled? Can irony (or any aesthetic stance) be defended in an age of activism, especially at a time when so many political questions appear to be matters of life or death, when few individuals tolerate opinions different from those of their party?

  How does the essay fare in such a politically dichotomized world? How does the many-sided essayist take a side? Can the genuine essay be compatible with the political certitude that usually drives the opinions of advocates and activists? These aren’t recent questions. In his sprawling and unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities, first published in the dangerous early 1930s, the delightfully ironic Austrian writer Robert Musil created a fascinating protagonist who realizes that his thinking life has taken on the shape of the essay. As such, he finds himself in opposition to systems, certainty, and consistency, and far more inclined to inertia than action. He terms his resistance to action “essayism,” from the way that the essay “takes a thing from many sides without comprehending it wholly.” As the novelist Alan Wall puts it, Musil’s essayism “is characterised by an aversion to the axiomatic, a deliberated provisionality, an acceptance of uncertainty, an openness to the possibilities of intellectual adventure and discovery which Musil liked to call ‘possibilitarian.’” Musil saw this intellectual and emotional tendency as more than a literary phenomenon—it was essentially a conflict between doubt and decision, nihilism and activism.

  Bourne believed that without irony the activist essayist would too easily lapse into the polemicist, and he himself had his lapses. Political pressure obviously creates difficult situations for some writers who, though they may posses strong allegiances and commitments, may still feel personally, intellectually, or even artistically compelled to examine unpopular points of view. To take just one example: if in our time being “undemocratic” or “authoritarian” appears to be one of the most horrible attitudes anyone can imagine—both politically and ethically—would a writer risk challenging the unquestioned superiority of democracy to all other political systems? To be perceived as attacking democracy—even hypothetically or in essayistic speculation—could possibly label one for life a fascist, Stalinist, Nazi, or worse. Trigger warning: students may want to avoid Plato’s Republic.