Vol. 1, Number 4	Winter 1998 issue

 

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How We Want to Live: Narratives on Progress presents the thoughts of "seventeen distinguished writers on the meaning of progress in their own lives." The editors, Porter Shreve and Susan Richards Shreve, set up a high expectation: that the series of narratives will be as satisfying as personal fiction and still convey a clear sociological message. While How We Want to Live does fulfill its promise of being entertaining, it unfortunately falls short on substantive discussion.

To start with, the personal narratives tend to be engaging, but narrow. John Barth, for example, writes extensively about his relationship with cats. What is missing, however, is any broader statement of how progress or modernity has affected his life. The essay leaves Barth's readers wondering why exactly the his encounter with a dead cat is more relevant to life today than anything in their own lives.

Some writers, like Deborah Tannen, do try to relate progress to the entirety of their lives. But unfortunately, in its attempt tp be more comprehensive her essay is ultimately bogged down. The authors who attempt to incorporate more analysis run into the barrier of space limitations.

Because most of the writers are novelists, space limitations are a major problem in How We Want to Live. As a medium, the novel allows much more development than the five to twenty page essay that this collection requires. Asking a novelist to write a short narrative is like asking a marathon runner to compete in the quarter mile: the pacing just won't be right.

Added to the problem of space constraints is the constraint of dealing with a sociological topic like progress. A perfect example is the response of Ishmael Reed, an essayist, poet, novelist, and professor at the University of California at Berkeley. His five-page essay is a dose of negative rhetoric that is the espresso of essays. In an extreme case of the overambition of many pieces in this collection, he denounces almost all of modernity but offers little justification.

The partial failure of this collection of essays raises the question of whether such collections can work at all. The question is not irrelevant: this is the second collection of this sort that these editors have published, and they will likely try more. Moreover, the entertaining nature of the form could possibly start a trend of similar collections. Editors must be wary, however, of the dangers inherent to the form, and create much more reasonable projects than asking novelists to address progress in a small amount of space.