Our essays, ourselves: in defense of the big idea.(Critical Essay)

Discussed in this essay:

Five Shades of Shadow, by Tracy Daugherty. University of Nebraska Press, 2003. 296 pages. $27.95.

The Fish's Eye: Essays About Angling and the Outdoors, by lan Frazier. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. 176 pages. $20.

The Nature of Home: A Lexicon and Essays, by Lisa Knopp. University of Nebraska Press, 2002. 256 pages. $24.95.

Local Wonders: Sessions in the Bohemian Alps, by Ted Kooser. University of Nebraska Press, 2002. 168 pages. $22.

The Founding Fish, by John McPhee. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. 358 pages. $25.

The essay, we sometimes hear, is "the freest form in all of literature." How is it, then, that the hot new essay collections on my desk look so damn similar? Published recently by writers both famous and obscure, they look uncannily interchangeable. For one thing, each sports a photograph of the Great Outdoors on the cover: a darkened road through the wilderness, an old American truck in the grasslands, sun-kissed trees, or, at the least, a close-up of some freshly slain fish. Indeed, the volume by lan Frazier and the one by John McPhee seem (to my untutored eye) to have exactly the same unhappy fish flung in precisely the same fashion around their spine. Many of these books have bucolic titles like The Nature of Home, Local Wonders, The Founding Fish.

Open them up and the differences do not dramatically increase. Whether elaborating the illness occasioned by their author's absence from her prairie home (Lisa Knopp), waxing lyrical about the Okies (Tracy Daugherty), painting the tranquil pleasures of shad fishing (John McPhee), reminiscing about bugs bothered as a boy (Ian Frazier), or recalling the pies of an Iowa grandmother (Ted Kooser), these books share a somewhat sleepy obsession with rural retreats, peaceable pastimes, and childhood memories. The name of a loved local landscape--"Oregon's Willamette Valley," "Nebraska"--appears in the first sentence of each one.

Extensive autobiographical detail attends them, too: three out of five narrate the author's medical experiences in lavish detail ("`Could you look at the back of my tongue on the left side?'" Kooser tells us he asked his doctor. "`I've had a sore spot back there for a number of weeks.'" "One Sunday night Margie and I were making love. `I'm sorry. I have to stop,'" Daugherty recalls saying as his heart trouble began). All of these writers deliver themselves to long and lingering backward glances at youthful pranks and pleasures (eating insects, walking in the woods). Many of them offer a level of precision about their CVs we never knew we wanted. Knopp actually ticks off the courses she taught during a brief stint at a university: "American Autobiography, Literary Journalism, American Travel Literature, Early American Literature." Indeed, lists appear to have become the literary device of choice in essays of this ilk. Some go on for a page or two, like the one Frazier makes, in The Fish's Eye, of the many-thousand kinds of bait contained in a cluttered old store. No detail strikes these writers as too small or too banal to include: if they noticed it, it's important. Thus Frazier relates every word of three consecutive telephone conversations he overheard in the store:

   "Angler's Roost." 
   "........." 
   "We've got all kinds of hook hones." 
   "........." 
   "Fresh and salt, both." 
   "........" 
   "Yes, some of them are grooved." 
   "........." 
   "Each one comes in a plastic case." 
   "........." 
   "Different lengths. I think two-inch 
   and three-inch." 

That even writers as formidable as Frazier and McPhee have yielded to such pedestrian rehearsals is testimony to the pettily autobiographical frenzy that has lately seized American essayists--a frenzy for cozy, complacent, and oddly insular self-revelation that has swallowed them up numbers. When it does not take the form of pastoral angling tales, this frenzy easily assumes the shape of urban micro-histories such as Joseph Epstein's repeatedly anthologized "The Art of the Nap," in which he describes--with loving precision and evident satisfaction--his own slumbering tastes:

"Sleeping in some beds," he wagers,

   is more pleasurable than sleeping in 
   others.... As a boy, I would have 
   been delighted to have slept in a 
   bunk bed; I only did so later in the 
   army. I have never slept in a hammock.... 
   Sleeping in the cramped 
   quarters of a submarine wouldn't be 
   easy for me. Sleeping …