. . . despite the obvious abundance of documentation in nonfiction, some of the literature in this genre challenges that very presumption of fact; the very character, in other words, of what ‘nonfiction’ means. The lyric essay, as some have called the form, asks what happens when an essay begins to behave less like an essay and more like a poem. What happens when statistics, reportage, and observation in an essay are abandoned for image, emotion, expressive transformation? In this year [2003], as we continue to wade slowly through the start of a new century, our anxiety, either real or imagined, needles us over the crest of the rest of what’s left. The afterward of postmodernism waits for us there. There are now questions being asked of facts that were never questions before. What, we ask, is a fact these days? What’s a lie, for that matter? What constitutes an ‘essay,’ a ‘story,’ a ‘poem’? What, even, is ‘experience’?

   He broaches the question what constitutes an essay by presenting examples, making the late-Wittgensteinian assumption that even if he can’t define the concept "essay," he can use it. The essay for D’Agata is a tool. Miller’s wish for lexical adequacy of language can’t come true because use always precedes naming. In Wittgenstein’s formulation, "One has already to know (or be able to do) something in order to be capable of asking a thing's name." In the face of the impossibility of Miller’s dream of an identity between sense and reference, D’Agata postulates an identity between sense and use. If Miller believes in the redemptive power of telling the truth, D’Agata wonders whether it’s possible to tell the truth. If Miller is trying to discover the language of the body, D’Agata is trying to discover the body of language.

   Both books are interesting in part for the ways they violate their own assumptions. Miller plays out her faith in narrative’s imitation of life long enough to arrive at the question whether life obeys the fundamental Aristotelian narrative stricture, that it possess beginning, middle, and end. She wishes there were such clear progression. "Perhaps I was so intrigued by the Jewish prayer books because in my daily life, I read voraciously in the ‘normal’ way, front-to-back," and in doing so "the gap between language and sense dissolved, and I simply understood." But then she asks whether "we ever live our lives as determinedly forward as our narratives suggest," and suggests that "endings never stay put, but keep changing into beginnings," leaving us "reeling in a perpetual present." D’Agata, for his part, despite his skepticism about facts and narratives, organizes his collection autobiographically. He questions the forward movement of the essay, denying that it is "an outline traveling toward a foregone conclusion," and reveling in its being "a wide-eyed dallying in the heat of predicaments," but then he starts his collection with an essay published in 1975, the year of his birth, and—traveling in a straight line toward a foregone conclusion—chooses one essay for every year of his own life.

   Each book has its own interest, independently of any comparison. Miller’s is most interesting when she discusses her discovery that she is a "DES daughter," born of a pregnancy during which her mother took the drug DES, a drug purported to protect against miscarriage, and prescribed, Miller tells us, to over five-million pregnant women between 1938 and 1971. At that point the book attains its highest specific gravity, the greatest concentration of emotional weight in the subject itself rather than in the rhetoric. In the same discussion, Miller’s trust in narrative becomes more reflective, because she is forced to abandon one kind of narrative and adopt another. Before she learned about DES, she was influenced by stories in the Hebrew Bible about women whose barrenness was punishment by God, so "I tended to see my infertility as an appropriate consequence for a girl who broke the rules." Learning about DES enforces a different kind of narrative, in which she suffers not because of her own sinfulness but because of natural forces combined with societal injustices to women.

   D’Agata’s book is most interesting not for its argument against "nonfiction" as a catch-all category into which to dump the essay, but for the interest of the essays themselves; or, in other words, not because of what he says about the essays, but because he did such a good job of choosing them. His preferences lie toward formal experimentation, so the list of authors includes David Antins and Carole Masos rather than John Updikes. The essays themselves include: Jenny Boully’s footnotes without a body of text, titled of course "The Body," which implores the reader at one point to "recall that sometimes the world is violet and amass with wanderers"; Harry Mathews’ detailed recipe for preparing shoulder of lamb; James Wright’s essay, presented in prose, that is also a strict sonnet; Eliot Weinberger’s "dream," composed of tall tales about India, where "it was so hot men’s balls hung down to their knees, and the men had to tie them up and apply special ointments"; Anne Carson’s "Kinds of Water," in which "unexpectedness moves us along"; David Foster Wallace’s trip to the Illinois State Fair; and so on.