About a year ago I cancelled my subscription to
Harpers. Why? Because it was virtually unreadable. I like Lewis Lapham; I find
his sensibilities often jive with my own, though I’m much less strident (except after a few glasses of wine). He’s got
an East Coast elite vibe going that I find off-putting, but for the most part, I enjoy his opening essays in the
magazine. But for a while there, every time I cracked Harpers, I would find some dreadfully long intellectual screed
that served more to put me to sleep than awaken any personal sense of injustice.
Maybe I’m just dense, but for a while there Harpers read like some liberal arts graduate school literary journal. It
was such a disappointment to me. After all they were the ones who ran one of my favorite travel
pieces of all time by David Foster Wallace. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe I didn’t give Harpers a chance (though I was a
subscriber for, like, ten years) and it was just going through a phase, and Lapham was just blowing off some cerebral
steam. Whatever the case, I’ve now stumbled upon a few really amazing articles that ran in the magazine over the course
of the year that I missed. One of them, I read last night and came away wondering if I ought to renew my subscription.
I’ve raved here about Tom Bissell a few times. I’m sorry, but he’s just one of those writers who I find, um,
unputdownable. And last night, as I was reading the new
Best American Travel Writing Anthology, I came cross Bissell’s piece on heading back to Vietnam with his father and
I was really blown away. The article ran in Harper’s December
2004 issue, and I’m sorry I missed it when it came out, but glad as all get out that I discovered it.
The story takes Bisseell and his father back to where his dad was injured during the Vietnam War. It’s a father-son
self-discovery piece. It’s a script for a buddy movie (well, OK, not quite). And more than a Vietnam War memoir through
the son’s eyes, the article is both an incandescent piece of travel writing, and an emotion-jangling work of
introspection. I wish I could post the article here. God knows I spent enough time looking for a link to it. But
suffice to say this lone article is justification enough to buy the damn book.