Dillon is a mournful, witty and original writer ... It is a beautiful container for irreconcilable desires and impossible ambitions ... Dillon’s mode is rhapsody, not analysis. He invites us to gawk at his intellectual crushes — their shapely sentences, wily inversions, daring transitions ... he moves with a hummingbird energy, flitting to the next writer, the next effect he loves ... He often writes in generalities — but they bristle with clues, with suggestive and, yes, odd language ... Out of that disarray come these crystalline pieces — and a sense, never belabored, of the stakes of creating essays and the consolations of loving them.
The essay has to convey mastery while admitting partiality. This is very hard to do well ... Dillon himself is a superbly varied essayist ... Dillon argues earnestly for aphorists to turn away from this fetish for essence or assertion and to instead fill that space with 'desire' and urgency ... it is a testament to Dillon’s sharp critical eye that he can move from Clark to Perec in this way. One of the marks of a great essayist is to be able to see connections ... this one is a collection of essays on essays, part literary critical appreciation of writers such as William Gass and Elizabeth Hardwick, part belle lettristic exploration of the essence of a genre. But Dillon does not shy away from letting us in, obliquely but unmistakably, to his own personal struggles with depression and anxiety ... written in lucid, exacting and unsentimental prose, Essayism is a vital book for people who turn to art – and especially writing – for consolation ... As the book draws to its conclusion, it must confront another habit of the merely competent essay: the way such a piece of writing returns, too neatly, to an initial premise or image. This, too, raises Dillon’s critical hackles.
In his nifty little book, Essayism, Brian Dillon, a professor at London’s Royal College of Art, can’t resist being the teacher, which makes his readers the students. But who wouldn’t want to learn from a writer who knows and loves his subject? So, children, stop squirming and pay attention, because anyone who reads Lester Bangs’s manic essays about rock music as an antidote to disabling depression has something to tell us.
Dillon’s book is itself a kind of conglomerate, which is to say it is an essay by another name. Opening with a lengthy (as in, two-page) sequential sentence, it wears its influences on its sleeve. This is among Essayism’s abiding pleasures, the author’s engagement as a reader ... I don’t share his fascination with Barthes, or for that matter any of the theorists, but I am deeply committed to the self-exposure he uncovers in the work.
In Essayism, the Irish writer Brian Dillon says a great deal more [about the essay form]. He says it, moreover, essayistically, which is to say in rambling, rather disorganized, far-from-complete fashion ... Ought one to admire the courage of a writer who works under such a psychological burden? Or ought one feel he should be charged a psychotherapist’s fee for laying all his mental problems on us, strangers who happen to have come upon his book? ... Brian Dillon’s Essayism is both an exemplar and a casualty of the therapeutic culture’s influence on literature in general and on the essay in particular.
Imagine a type of writing so hard to define its very name should be something like: an effort, an attempt, a trial,' Dillon aptly observes at the outset of this self-reflexive collection of essays about essay-writing ... He introduces readers to many of his writing heroes, among them Cyril Connolly, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Theodor Adorno, and is adept at explaining Hardwick’s exquisite comma placement and William Gass’s 'shameless' penchant for alliteration ... His book is both an argument for and an example of the essay as the most complex and human literary form.
