Adam Gopnik, a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, is the editor of The Best American Essays 2008. David Marr, a frequent contributor to, and fearless commentator on, just about everything that matters in Australia, is the editor of The Best Australian Essays. ‘Editor’, surely, is not quite the right word. They are the selectors, as in who gets chosen for the World Series team or the Australian eleven. ‘Best’ also invites querulousness: it belittles by default the many essays not included and which might have been if both these compilations were as long as they needed to be to be inclusive. Still, we must make do with what both have chosen, and both editors have written introductions. Comparison does not seem at all odious because it might give some clue to the choices made by Gopnik and to the very different ones made by Marr.

Gopnik’s introduction seems almost to aspire to be an essay on the essay. It sometimes veers a little towards pretension, and he makes much of the essay as a personal point of view: ‘an essay without a bit of both abstract reflection and winning anecdote ... isn’t quite an essay. The ideal essay has facts and feelings, emotions and thoughts, an argument about and an anecdote from, parallel and then criss-crossing all over it. It is a classical form for short-winded romantics.’

There are three kinds of essay, Gopnik reckons: the review essay, the memoir essay and the odd-object essay. These might be characterised by Louis Menand, David Sedaris (both from The New Yorker) and Emily Grosholz (Prairie Schooner) in his own selection. If we apply his categories to the Australian volume, we might nominate Tim Flannery (New York Review of Books), Chris Hammer (Bulletin) and, if a Himalayan Whistling Thrush can be said to be an object, Robyn Davidson (The Monthly). But whittling the categories down to three does no justice to some of the best in both collections, and Gopnik’s insistence on the ‘I’ as the dominant voice of essays in general is surely more a description of his own choices than a law for all essayists. Insisting on the perpendicular pronoun also acts as a means of exclusion.

If the ‘review essay’ sits comfortably within the personal essay genre on which both of these books depend, there is surely scope for writers on the sciences, the visual arts, music, architecture and literature; but they make rare appearances. Gopnik’s volume does include an essay on ageing (by Atul Gawande, a surgeon who writes for the New Yorker), and Marr includes Rachel Robertson’s remarkable and deeply personal essay on autism (Australian Book Review). There is also Robert Dessaix’s short essay on Helen Garner’s novel The Spare Room (2008). Dessaix asks questions about the difference between fiction and nonfiction with finesse and good manners.

The kind of essay which Gopnik is at pains to define is always blamed on the legacy of that late sixteenth century man-about-property and seclusionist-in-tower Michel de Montaigne. What Gopnik calls Montaigne’s ‘comic scepticism’ is summed up for this reviewer in Montaigne’s refutation of Erasmus’s ‘Stercus cuique suum bene olet’ (Everyone’s shit smells good to himself): ‘If we had sound nostrils our shit ought to stink all the more from being our own’ (the translations are by M.A. Screech). What is often forgotten about Montaigne is his large library and his formidable learning.

David Marr’s introduction, filling only two pages, is so casual, so ‘Oh, do I really have to?’, as to be slipshod. The only thing Marr knows for sure is that an essay is not poetry and is not longer than 10,000 words. His own report on the public disclosure of the letters, notebooks and manuscripts left by Patrick White with his agent Barbara Mobbs, and which she handed over to the National Library in 2006, was just as unputdownable second time around.

For all that Gopnik’s introduction is an essay in itself and Marr’s surprisingly lazy, the Australian essays offer real meat on pressing public issues (for instance, Robert Manne’s ‘Sorry Business’, John van Tiggelen’s powerful ‘After Sorry’ and David Malouf’s essay on censorship and the arts), while the American essays include nothing on politics or climate change in the year of the political miracle. Both books were available for review by early October, just prior to confirmation of the miracle, but Gopnik’s choices are often eccentric and literary.

I had begun to worry for all those fine essayists published in the last third of the year until I came upon Anthony Lane’s ‘Candid Camera’, from a September 2007 issue of the New Yorker. Clearly, the essay year is almost the same as the tax year.

Wilfully treating the two books as one, the essay I would give first prize to is Lee Zacharias’s ‘Buzzards’ (Southern Humanities Review), from the American selection. It is a beautifully paced essay on death and the writer’s relationship to her father, the miniature insertions about the father acting as an ever-changing chorus between far longer descriptions of, and facts about, birds of prey. Zacharias has perfected the proportion of ‘I’ to the whole: it is hardly there, but central to the essay.

Gideon Haigh’s history of, and valediction for, the Bulletin (The Monthly) is terrific, but other essays by him must have been in contention, including the marvellous one on Bradman. Haigh and Marr, during a session at the 2008 Adelaide Writers’ Week, both derided the presence of ‘I’ in journalism, and Haigh rigorously eschews it. Actually, his essay on the Bulletin acts as an apologia for The Monthly, for which he often writes and which provides more than a third of the thirty-one essays in Marr’s anthology. Everything the Bulletin seemed to want to be in its last months was taken up by The Monthly, which, though legitimately different, might be as close as we’ll ever get to the New Yorker.

The Best Australian Essays includes many short, light pieces. Some, like the great Don Watson on the Anzac myth, are tiny wonders; some merely act as grace notes between heftier essays. The last section, ‘Life and Death’ includes the bitterly disappointing (you would not have expected Craig Sherborne’s ‘Unforgiven’ after the exhilaration and originality of his memoirs, Hoi Polloi, 2005, and Muck, 2007) and the odd shock of a line or two (Barry Humphries’ article on Arthur Boyd includes a reference to Boyd’s early patrons, ‘that sinister couple John and Sunday Reed, who have since been mythologised by people who never knew them’). This section closes with Nicolas Rothwell’s fine essay on the Czech artist Karel Kupka, who flew to Arnhem Land in the 1950s to collect what Rothwell (who is as much of a Romantic, in the best sense, as Kupka) calls ‘painted literature’, which phrase seems to describe Rothwell’s ability to conjure the spirits of landscape with words. There is a radiance in his writing.

The Best American Essays seems to demand a more literary readership than does the Australian volume. The subjects chosen by many of the essayists, then chosen by Gopnik, are abstract compared to the essays chosen by Marr. The Australian essays are peopled in a way the American essays are not. While all the Australian essays have been culled from accessible magazines and newspapers, the sources for the American essays include academic journals and regional literary magazines. What does this signify?

And what do we want from an essayist? Of paramount importance is what John Adams admired in Thomas Jefferson: an ‘elegance of pen’. One of the earliest lessons I learned from the New Yorker was that you might summon an interest in just about anything, if the writing is marvellous in itself. I remember reading Arlene Croce on dance every week in the 1970s, despite an almost complete lack of interest in dance. Ditto baseball, thanks to Roger Angell. In 2006 the novelist David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest, published an essay on Roger Federer in a magazine called Play. It was a spellbinding combination of admiration for Federer’s uncanny ability and a brilliant technical explanation of the game. Similarly, I have little interest in homo floresiensis, or the hobbit, as she became known, but Ashley Hay’s essay ‘The Hobbit Wars’ in The Monthly was entrancing. It should have been included.

After a week immersed in these essays, I am now ready for a novel or twenty, but that is partly because of a preference for reading essays in situ, spaced within the journals and magazines – without which they would not exist.