The essay is the most pluckily pedestrian and blithely transgressive of literary genres, the one that is most at large and in need, picking through the leftovers of daily life and personal and social history to take what suits it and remake it as it sees fit. It is, at its lively best, quite indifferent to the claims of style, fashion, theory, and respectability, provoking and inspiring through the pleasure of surprise. In 2016, Phillip Lopate, who has been writing essays and thinking about the essay for decades now, turned his attention to one of the essay’s offshoots, the blog, a form by that time already thick with virtual dust. Lopate committed to writing a weekly blog about, really, whatever over the course of a year.
It was an experiment, and what came out of it was A Year and a Day, a virtuosic (if never showy) demonstration of the essay’s range and reach, meandering, looping back, hitting reset, forging on. Lopate’s topics along the way include family, James Baldwin, going to China, Agnes Martin, Abbas Kiarostami, the resistible rise of Donald Trump, death, desire, and the tribulations, small and large, of daily life. What results is at once a self-portrait, a picture of the times, and a splendid book of essays.
