What does Samuel Taylor Coleridge have to do with liquid nitrogen ice cream?

Venus Zine, June 25th, 2007

I read pretty much all of At Large and At Small in one sitting, slightly hung over, lying around in bed on a Saturday morning. When I’m reading a collection of essays by a pronounced journalist (Fadiman being the former editor of The American Scholar), this isn’t usually how it’s done. For one thing, I might sit upright.

But At Large and At Small isn’t exactly a series of critical essays per se — it’s a collection of “familiar essays,” a genre of the essay form that experienced its height of popularity during the early 19th century. Fadiman explicates, “The familiar essayist didn’t speak to the millions; he spoke to one reader… His viewpoint was subjective, his frame of reference concrete, his style digressive, his eccentricities conspicuous, and his laughter usually at his own expense.” In a nutshell, she places the familiar essay somewhere between a critical essay and a personal essay.

Well, OK. Though the term isn’t well circulated in the popular lexicon, the form has lived on in some way or another (think Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation), which belies the need for any literary archeologist to claim exhuming. But it’s best getting past these minor annoyances. I can firmly attest that Fadiman’s collection is a great summer pleasure.

It’s a pleasure mainly because in the process of drudging up a literary exercise for herself, Fadiman does a lot more. She extols the virtues of liquid nitrogen ice cream, romanticizes the late 17th century London postage system, expounds on the many attempts of Samuel Taylor Coleridge to escape his own life, trapezes through her personal decision of moving from a New York loft to a Massachusetts country house, and pines over romantic poet and essayist Charles Lamb. Her subjects are as random as they are varied, but they often have to do with how historical ideas and practices inform or clash with modern ones, a theme most prominent in her previous work of journalistic nonfiction, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, an account of the interaction between a Hmong family and American doctors on the treatment of a Hmong girl diagnosed with epilepsy.

Claiming only to be an “enthusiastic amateur” in these essays, Fadiman doesn’t so much delve into her topics with the objective of uncovering something new— she simply promenades, hands in pockets, through them for the fun of doing so, illuminating forgotten scraps of history, juxtaposing a few old and new ideas, and fancifully embellishing other thinkers’ thoughts. In short, she fulfills her own description of the familiar essayist.

One of my favorite sleights-of-thought can be found in “Night Owl,” in which Fadiman digs up Boston University sociologist Murray Melbin’s comparison between working at night and pioneering the Wild West. “There are many parallels between night work and the settlement of the Western frontier,” she writes, before listing, “the pioneers tend to be young and nonconformist (the middle-aged are home watching Jay Leno); the population is sparse (owls tend to be mavericks); authority is decentralized (supervisors are asleep); life is informal (no coats and ties are required); there is hardship (fatigue, isolation, disruption of family routines) and lawlessness (parking-lot muggings).”

See? This is the kind of parenthetical, fetching, companionable musings you can look forward to for all 240 pages (alas, the book’s trim size is actually quite small). If I can be a literary arbitrator, I say skip the marketing copy for beach reads about single white women having cabana flings and shopping for Juicy Couture tube dresses. This is your best bet of the summer so far.