THE PROBLEM WITH ideas is that you can’t decide to have them.
Certain kinds of nonfiction can be made to happen. The writer who is diligent, observant, and inquisitive enough can always find a story: you read the paper, you watch the world, you ask enough questions, and sooner or later, there it is. You have to write it, of course, but it exists with or without you. There are decisions to be made—how best to unfurl the information, what to prioritize, whose perspective to privilege. But you do not have to invent the story, you just have to tell it. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m just saying it can be done.
An essay is another matter. Because whatever its narrative shape, an essay must have an idea as its beating heart. And ideas come to you on their own terms. Searching for an idea is like resolving to have a dream.
At least that’s been my experience as a writer. Once in a while—a very extended while—an idea is there in my head, ready to become an essay, and I feel lucky and elated. (So long as I have a pen in my purse, that is. “I am always disturbed,” as the composer Igor Stravinsky said of his ideas for musical compositions, “if they come to my ear when my pencil is missing and I am obliged to keep them in my memory.” If he was forced to wait too long to write down his idea, Stravinsky went on, “I am in danger of losing the freshness of first contact and I will have difficulty in recapturing its attractiveness.”) For me, writing an essay is more pleasurable than any other kind of writing. Usually producing prose is like swimming: a test of will and discipline and fitness that feels good after you’ve finished doing it. But writing an essay is like catching a wave.
That ideas come as they please is just one of the challenges of writing essays, of course. To catch a wave, you need skill and nerve, not just moving water. As anyone can tell you who has paddled belly-down on a surfboard—frantic and futile as a windup tub toy pulled out of the bath—it is by no means a given that you’ll be able to stand up and ride just because the perfect wave comes along. It takes practice and finesse and, not least of all, courage. Because falling off can make you look foolish, and it can hurt. Crafting a piece of writing around an idea you think is worthwhile—an idea you suspect is an insight—requires real audacity. It is an act of daring.
The pleasure of reading essays is that you don’t have to wait for the waves. (And you don’t have to paddle out and get dragged under and bonked in the face with your surfboard over and over until you’re dizzy and bedraggled and enraged—which may have happened to me once or thrice.) You just lie back on your towel and gaze out toward the horizon.
There goes Roger Angell, whizzing across the sea! I am no less impressed that he can write an essay as brilliant as “This Old Man” at ninety-three years of age than I would be if I saw him shredding a ten-foot wave—when, as he is the first to admit, “the lower-middle sector of my spine twists and jogs like a Connecticut country road, thanks to a herniated disk seven or eight years ago. This has cost me two or three inches of height, transforming me from Gary Cooper to Geppetto.” Angell’s accomplishment here is significant: he has managed to turn kvetching about aging into a page-turner. (As he quite accurately puts it, “I am a world-class complainer.”) Ultimately, though, his essay isn’t stunning because he wrote it in his tenth decade; it’s just an astoundingly wonderful piece of writing. “‘How great you’re looking! Wow, tell me your secret!’ they kindly cry when they happen upon me crossing the street or exiting a dinghy or departing an X-ray room,” he writes, “while the little balloon over their heads reads ‘Holy shit—he’s still vertical!’” But it’s not all funny. Looming over the essay is the “oceanic force and mystery” of loss. Angell’s oldest daughter, Callie, took her own life. He has outlived most of his friends and contemporaries. Angell’s wife of forty-eight years, Carol, died in 2012, and he still hears her voice in his head. Propelling the reader from Angell’s first sentence to his last is an insight we are desperate to follow until it crashes on the sand: the amazing thing about getting old, Angell tells us, is that the “accruing weight of these departures doesn’t bury us, and that even the pain of an almost unbearable loss gives way quite quickly to something more distant but still stubbornly gleaming.”
Aging was a big topic in the essays submitted this year, possibly because the baby boomers are doing so much of it. Mark Jacobson, a champion word surfer, has the insight that becoming an alte kaker is no different from becoming middle-aged when you’re accustomed to being a young adult, or from turning into a young adult when you’ve just gotten the hang of hormone-riddled adolescence. At sixty-five, “ear hair and all, I remain resolutely myself. I am the same me from my baby pictures, the same me who got laid for the first time in the bushes behind the high school field in Queens, the same me who drove a taxi through Harlem during the Frank Lucas days, the same me my children recognize as their father, the same me I was yesterday, except only more so by virtue of surviving yet another spin of the earth upon its axis. I was at the beginning again,” Jacobson writes. “A Magellan of me.”
Those are the ideas and words of two men who have been writing for a long time, and it’s great fun sitting on the shore watching the pros do what they’ve been practicing for decades. But it’s joyous in a different way to see someone who’s just starting out get it right. That’s how I felt reading Kelly Sundberg’s elegant, haunting “It Will Look Like a Sunset.” The insight she gives us is that domestic violence happens “so slowly, then so fast.” (Which is to say that it is not as inconceivable as we—I—might imagine.) She spent years married to someone she found impressive and beautiful: “When our elderly neighbor developed dementia and one night thought a boy was hiding under her bed, Caleb stayed with her. When the child of an administrative assistant in Caleb’s department needed a heart transplant, Caleb went to the assistant’s house and helped him put down wood floors in his basement to create a playroom for the little boy.” Violence enters their life in little flashes—forgivable, far apart. “First he pushed me against a wall. It was two more years before he hit me, and another year after that before he hit me again.” Along the way, there was the creation of a home, the birth of a child, the invention of a shared adult life. And Sundberg takes us inside it. We are with her, in the texture of her days, in the sparkling intimacy of her early relationship with a young man who lived in a cabin in the woods that he built with his own hands. We experience her isolation when they move to be near his parents, and her disbelief as her only friend, the father of her child, becomes increasingly dangerous.
Her idea—like Angell’s and Jacobson’s and all the writers’ ideas in this book—teaches us something, offers us a new way of thinking about a subject we may imagine we already understand. But her writing also lets us feel what it is like to be her. (An essay need not be in the first person, of course, and not all of these are. In Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Crooked Ladder,” there is no “I”; the writer’s presence is never acknowledged in the writing. But we feel him there all the same—his intellect and his empathy. His idea is enlightening, but it’s his writing that makes us experience it as truth.)
For me, reading the essays in this anthology was as satisfying and invigorating as glimpsing a school of dolphins rippling in and out of the water: a privilege.
ARIEL LEVY