Styling

John Lanchester

• United States by Gore Vidal
  Deutsch, 1298 pp, £25.00, October 1993, ISBN 0 233 98832 7
• What Henry James Knew, and Other Essays on Writers by Cynthia Ozick
  Cape, 363 pp, £12.99, June 1993, ISBN 0 224 03329 8
• Sentimental Journeys by Joan Didion
  HarperCollins, 319 pp, £15.00, January 1993, ISBN 0 00 255146 2

Few discussions of the essay fail to begin etymological: essai, ‘assay’, ‘trial’, ‘attempt’. The project of the essay is interrogative, investigative, exploratory, provisional; the essayist’s duty is to seek a personal confrontation with Montaigne’s question, so characteristic in its quizzical severity: que sais-je? Or so we are told. In practice, though, the essay tends to be more or less the precise opposite of such a sober and responsible self-examination. The writers who have used the form in the questioning spirit – the essayists, from Montaigne to Stanley Cavell, who generate a sense that the act of writing is for them a genuine process of intellectual exploration – are far outnumbered by those for whom the essay is a forum for pyrotechnics and exhibitionism, for politics and for performance. The history of the essay – from Hazlitt on his first acquaintance with poets to Orwell on the sex life of the common toad – is the history of writers taking a break from other forms in order, not to ask themselves que sais-je? but simply to strut their stuff.