NONFICTION - Dec. 8, 1991

THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 1991, edited by Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan (Ticknor & Fields: $19.95; $9.95 paper; 352 pp.) . Given the precarious state of the American magazine, slowly being choked to a premature death by a lack of advertising, suffering from shortened articles and chopped editorial budgets, this collection of essays, culled from 300 nominees, is almost too intense to digest in a single sitting. A single decent essay, all by itself, is a marvelous deception, a short piece that is vast enough to wander in for days. Here are enough remarkable ones, culled from journals as diverse as Tikkun and the Michigan Quarterly Review, GQ and Natural History, to satisfy the cravings of any print junkie.

You will need a road map; magazines have distinctive personalities, but this collection defies category. Woody Allen provides an almost somber meditation on the Holocaust and the state of Israel, only to be followed by a wacky reflection, “The Female Body,” by novelist Margaret Atwood. She, in turn, is followed by John Updike, who also considers the female body. It’s impossible not to laugh aloud at the disparity between the two views; it is as though someone had asked an Eskimo and a Samoan to describe a bird. Joy Williams’ Esquire piece, “The Killing Game,” is a great, glib examination of the hunter’s psyche.