Reviewed by Karin Killian
As Emily Dickinson told us: Forever – is composed of Nows. That is, life is a series of moments. Our job as writers is to mine meaning from the moments we live, in an attempt to understand both this confounding world and our role in it, to turn our moments into art.
The Enjoy Agenda: At Home and Abroad, a collection of short essays by Rick Bailey (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), is a recitation of moments that make up one man’s life. The forty essays in this slim collection span decades and move freely through time, memory association, and geography. These moments are as diverse as they are detailed, providing glimpses of an interesting life, lived mostly in Michigan, as well as the author’s travels around the United States and to England, Italy, and China.
Bailey’s writing glows when he stays in one moment for the entirety of an essay, fully inhabiting a scene with crystalline detail. Standouts include the story of a brief visit from a childhood friend who took a drastically different life path, and a delicately braided essay about aging, the Beatles, and a visit to another lifelong friend who is ill. These exemplary pieces strike the perfect balance of the essay form, highly detailed and unsentimental, but rich with imagery that allows emotion to glimmer just below the surface of the page.
Bailey’s narrative style is efficient. The essays in this collection all begin en media res, wasting no words on rumination. The sheer quantity of moments and thoughts packed into The Enjoy Agenda is remarkable. Yet, as a reader I often wished for more connective tissue between the contrasting opinions and scenes. Some of the essays in this collection move from moment to moment and thought to thought so randomly, I found myself grasping to locate the narrative through-line.
Also, several of these essays read like argumentative papers, in which the author presents stacks of disparate moments, attempting, it seems, to substantiate why and how his particular opinions are valid. The opening essay in the collection, titled “Inner Music,” expounds on “the eminent strangeness of gratuitous music,” which is another way of saying, the author thinks humming is annoying. In “Call it a Dance,” Bailey is concerned with “the degradation of dance” and his belief that dancing has been recently “reduced to rhythmic flopping.” In “Shorty” he uses explanation of society’s prejudice against short men as justification for why the employee in his local wine shop would not accept the return of a half-drunk bottle of “bad” wine. And many of the essays contain strong opinions about food, what food is good, what food is bad, and how hard it is to get food that is up to one’s distinguished standard when not at home.
Travel provides the backdrop for the last third of the book, especially Baily’s time in China, staying with one of his children who was living there, and many trips to the village in Italy that his wife’s family is from. However, many of his narrative snapshots of other cultures are taken through an acutely ethnocentric lens, lacking the critical self-awareness necessary to add nuance, depth or humor. This is especially glaring in his essays about China, which he refers to as “a strange, exotic country.”
In The Enjoy Agenda: At Home and Abroad Rick Bailey paints a clear picture of a full life lived by a midwestern man of the baby boom generation. While some of the essays in this collection glow individually, the collection as a whole is less satisfying. It is one thing to illustrate a life, and the opinions one has formed over the course of living it. It is another to make art of it. The Enjoy Agenda achieves the former, absolutely, but falls short of the ultimate goal.
Karin Killian is a writer from Northern Minnesota and a fiction candidate in The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her prose has recently appeared in Hobart and Creative Nonfiction.
