VV: Best of America

A new collection of American magazine writing covers a wide range of styles

All great writers have first broken ground in magazines.

Of the many realms of expression "" humour, photography, poetry, painting, cartoons, fiction "" that have been the essential elements of magazines, journalism is the foremost. And good journalism means writing that is an extension of speech and done in an atmosphere of unhampered spontaneity, that is utterly open-ended in its possibilities.

Nathaniel Hawthorne had said, "the great merit of style ...is to make the words completely disappear into the thought". But feeling must come first. Above all, good journalism does not mean "" it is necessary to remind ourselves about this "" going for big names in the apparent belief that fame and quality go hand in hand. They don't.

These are some of the guidelines that went into the making of The Best American Magazine Writing 2003, edited by David Remnick (Harper Collins, $10) "" the best from the top of the shelf of American literary magazines that range from the New Yorker, Harper's, American Scholar, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, Fortune, et al.

The range of interests is wide and across the board "" reportage, features, commentary, profiles, specialised journalism, political analysis and of course extracts of fiction from works in progress.

Though tiny salvoes from the big literary guns will help to sell the anthology, its reputation and influence will come, as it has done in earlier issues, from the political and sociological essays.

The guiding principle was the prose not the subject though of course topicality had to be kept in mind. But it was the way language flowed that finally called the shots; it was not to be chained by the treadmill of daily journalism "" a thousand-word response to yesterday's or today's events or issues. Writers have had the opportunities to stretch out a bit, mull things over, use the room that a three- or four-thousand word piece would buy them.

The 19 essays here are not just descriptions or analyses of something abstract; they are here because they are part and parcel of our daily living. You read them because of the juiciest literary style one could hope to read anywhere.

To come to some brief specifics of the four essays: James Wolcott's "U.S.Confidential"; Christopher Hitchens' "Jewish Power, Jewish Peril"; James Fallows' "The Fifty-First State?"; and Katha Pollitt's "Backlash Babies". Here is the gist of each of these.

Wolcott gets into America's subconscious and its current thinking on key issues "" terrorism coverage, tabloid news and white-collar criminals "" without sounding overwrought and hypercritical. He simply presents facts, offers perspectives and leaves us to think what to make of America's obsessions. When American reality possesses a quality of anything goes, all the writer has to do is to give facts, just as they are. "Truth is stranger than fiction," Mark Twain had said, "because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't."

Hitchens who is probably one of the best-informed critics on contemporary world politics and America's dubious role in it, tackles the old chestnut, anti-Semitism which is finding new currency in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Hitchens' explores the ironies behind Israel's founding, the seemingly ineradicable hatred and whether there could be any solution to the Palestine problem.

Iraq has to be there and Fallows is brave enough to answer the question asked by a British correspondent: "Is this war going to make history by being the first to end before its cause could be known?" But it isn't a clear-cut answer because no one really knows what "the end" means.

By carefully selecting a chorus of experts, drawing upon current events and history, Fallows outlines the long-term consequences for the whole of the West Asia with a proviso that "wars change history in ways no one can foresee".

Katha Pollitt is a "reconstructed feminist" who asks the question that many women have done: "If women allow motherhood to relegate them to secondary status in the workplace and at home, can women will ever achieve equality?" No straight answers but Pollitt offers her comments with wit and passion.

Read some of these essays, if only to fortify your resistance to the gutter press.