Review by Choice Review
Klaus (emer., Univ. of Iowa; founding director, University of Iowa's nonfiction writing program) buries forever the notion that the writer of the personal essay speaks to readers in his or her own voice. Bringing to this book his own humanity and an encyclopedic knowledge gained in a lifetime of reading, the author demonstrates that writers ranging from Montaigne to Joan Didion work carefully to craft a voice that sounds spontaneous and uncrafted. The book itself is a model of its subject, as the author embraces the "freewheeling form of essays" in the individual chapters. For example, the chapter titled "Discontinuous: Form of Consciousness"--which examines the segmented essays of such writers as E. B. White and John McPhee, and explains why the term "collage" does not adequately honor their artistry--comprises seven small segments, in a strong first-person voice, with a recursive structure of a mind teasing over a puzzle. In other chapters, Klaus recounts his changing understanding of voice as he read and reread a particular White essay; the new personal essays about difference and culture; and how paying attention to point of view in George Orwell's "A Hanging" rewarded him by changing his mind about the essay, which he had taught for years. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. C. A. Bily Macomb Community College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Virginia Woolf expressed the paradox of the personal essayist with the dictum "Never to be yourself and yet always -that is the problem." In these engrossing essays, Klaus, the founding director of the University of Iowa's nonfiction writing program, reminds readers that the personal essay's authorial "I" is a "textual stand-in" for the author. Drawing from writers as varied as Woolf, Montaigne, Orwell, E. B. White, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard and James Baldwin, he conducts a thorough inquiry into the ways the essayist's persona is shaped not only by the interior but also by the exterior, and by individual experience and culture. He examines the writer's persona as a complex construct, "a fabricated thing, a character of sorts," influenced by structure, style and voice, then filtered through the reader's perception. He shows how Montaigne, the originator of the modern essay, attempted to portray his "entire being" and thereby demonstrated the impossibility of revealing the mind's full inferiority. Though Montaigne sometimes claimed to be consubstantial with his writing, he admitted in "Of Vanity" that his digressive "lusty sallies" were deliberately composed to suggest casualness. Personal essays may appear as artless and uncontrived thoughts on the page, but they are in fact polished illusions of such. Writing, Klaus notes, makes it impossible to present ideas exactly as they arise: authors must pin words down even as the mind lopes ahead.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 24, 2010]
