‘Life is an Ecstasy’ the New York Review of Books on Sex and the River Styx
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By Phillip Lopate
There is probably no essayist today who has earned more respect from his peers and fellow practitioners than Edward Hoagland. John Updike called him “the best essayist of my generation,” Philip Roth said he was “America’s most intelligent and wide-ranging essayist-naturalist,” and Joyce Carol Oates described him evocatively as “our Chopin of the genre.” It may have cost these famous novelists little to crown him king of what they may think a lesser genre; but he has also been a model for younger environmental writers, such as Gretel Ehrlich, Bill McKibben, and Scott Russell Sanders.
A novelist or poet of his accomplishments would be receiving lengthy career assessments and White House invitations at this point in his career, whereas Hoagland’s books are now consigned to small presses and a smattering of reviews. True, he is a most peculiar writer, an intricate stylist whose prose seems rooted in a tradition that resists speed-reading, and who has obstinately staked out two territories, the ruminative (as opposed to the narrative) personal essay and nature writing, which are among the least commercially catching. There is something very moving about a master personal essayist continuing to articulate the challenges of life right up to the end, no matter what size the readership.
Since Hoagland draws unreservedly on his own life, even his most casual readers will be familiar with it. He was born in 1932 in New York City; when he was eight his family moved to rural Connecticut and he was free to roam outdoors. His father—a straitlaced, bigoted Republican lawyer, who canceled his subscription to the Metropolitan Opera after the black contralto Marian Anderson sang there, and would later disinherit his two children when they got divorced—provided an ideal target for rebellion.
The entire review is available at the New York Review of Books’ website, to subscribers.
