SOURCE: Gundy, Jeff. “Handling the Truth.” Georgia Review 106, no. 3 (fall 2000): 559-72.

In the following excerpt, Gundy explores notions of truth in the essay collections of several authors, including Delbanco's The Lost Suitcase.

Essays are often viewed as a kind of supplement, something that novelists and poets do with the leftover thoughts and stray impulses and bits of material that won't fit into their “real” work. Several aspects of the books under discussion here support this theory. One of them begins with an essay that the author breezily confesses having pieced together out of fragments from his commonplace book. And while dust-jacket notes are hardly to be trusted, if we take these at their word we learn that none of these authors is before all else an essayist. Of the whole group, only Sam Pickering is not more widely known as a poet or fiction writer, and even he...