American English, Italian Chocolate

Starred review from April 24, 2017
Bailey (The Creative Writer’s Craft) finds inspiration in everyday mundanities—buying a cup of coffee, helping his wife replace a duvet cover—to create short memoiristic essays that can jump, say, from his Michigan boyhood to the plays of Shakespeare. The essays read like the best of short stories: their significance extends beyond what is on the page. Bailey demonstrates a genius for locating a telling detail and employing it sparingly to evoke a setting or character trait, keeping the writing concise and the pace swift. Bailey’s voice is genial and ingratiating and he expertly mixes literary allusions from his career as an English scholar with his Midwestern charm. His humor is the type to inspire smiles of recognition rather than full-on belly laughs. The book encompasses a wide variety of tones, from the earthy, with essays inspired by toilets, nail biting, and the rising trend of vomit in TV and movies, to the picturesque, in travelogue vignettes about Bailey’s experiences visiting Italy. Not every entry in this collection of 40 essays (some previously published in literary journals) feels completely realized, but overall the book delights and will makes readers stop and notice the individual pieces of their everyday lives.

May 15, 2017
Memories of a Michigan upbringing proceed to anecdotes on retirement in Italy, as a writing professor writes what pleases him, which is often about what doesn't.In this collection of short essays, Bailey (Emeritus, English/Henry Ford Coll.; co-editor: The Creative Writer's Craft: Lessons in Poetry, Fiction, and Drama, 1999, etc.) skips back and forth across time and place. Many of these pieces have been published in literary journals and small magazines, and they weren't necessarily intended (or sequenced) to be read as a whole. However, there are certain themes that pervade throughout. Some touch on mankind as part of nature and apart from it: "The outhouse was where man met beast, and the beast was himself." Some decry the ways that regional differences (especially in food) have given way to cultural homogenization. "Much of the United States looks like Ohio warmed over," he writes in the concluding title essay. "Pull off the freeway...and you'll see the same thing. When you pass the Bed Bath and Beyond, you'll know that Chili's is not far away." Bailey writes of flip-flops and sweatpants, of the idiosyncratic differences that a long, loving marriage encompasses, and of living in the very different cultures of the Midwest and of Italy, land of his wife's familial ancestors, where both of them feel comfortable. He writes of dreams, nightmares, and memories while recognizing of the last that "memory is capricious, frequently a liar." If readers identify with what he writes, that's fine, but one never gets the sense that he's writing for anyone but himself and that his essays represent the written equivalent of thinking out loud--or musing, wryly and wistfully. Maybe he writes because that's what academics do, write to publish, and because that's what writers do, observe to write. Easiest to digest in snack-size portions.

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