Critical Duties

...It "ought to be printed in all anthologies on the subject of progressive education," he said, then added: "At the same time it is a cold book...

...The distinction between "political" and "moral" guided the literary criticism of this onetime Marxist who had broken with the Communist Party...

...After Bell a series of captivating writers held forth in the fiction column, starting with Ruth Matthewson...

...At various times over the decades, many well-known critics presided here, like the brilliant and often lacerating Leslie A. Fiedler...

...Paul Theroux' Saint Jackwas "dazzling," "an explosively imaginative, manically virtuoso performance...

...William Gaddis, though, outdid all competition in this department...

...There is too much of everything in Herzog" Nevertheless, he continued, there are "notes so pure and piercing that all the book's torrent of words cannot drown them out...

...John Updike, at 30, received even higher praise: "If this young man can bring himself to slow down, to stay backstage, to choose larger subjects and shape them more fully, he cannot help becoming a major writer...

...From his writing in these precincts we can see the beginnings of his long career of canny, highly intelligent criticism...

...In 1968-69 Isa Kapp and Geoffrey Wolff rotated in the lead space...

...Baldwin's technical skill he found "most remarkable for its unobtrusiveness...

...Wincelberg recognized Heller's Catch-22 as being "sprawling, hilarious, irresponsible, compassionate, cynical, surrealistic, farcical, lacerating, and enormously readable...

...Doctorow's The Book of Daniel an "ambitious failure": "To write a book based on the Rosenberg case without once suggesting that they may have had something to do with an espionage ring is rather like writing about Alger Hiss without mentioning the typewriter that irrevocably exposed his lies...

...Mackenzie "superb and terrifying": "She is a truly sinister writer who commands, and gets, one's absolute assent to her dark vision while under her spell, and I know no greater praise for any novelist...

...Petersburg, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, and Mark Helprin's Freddy and Fredericka...

...but one who changes or ignores its essence is indefensibly evading the truth...

...With this, he enters at once into the front rank of American writers...

...As for Alain Robbe-Grillet and the Nouveau Roman, his "freedom from the conventions of the novel is the freedom of deprivation...

...William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch, "welcomed by Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer and others in terms more appropriate to King Lear' he found "a serious book about drug addiction for about the first 50 pages, and after that a gumbo of wild rhetoric, horror fantasy and pornography...

...It is a prodigal book, a breathtaking exhibition of sustained creativity...

...I did not always find it easy to decide which books to cover...

...Burroughs, he concluded bluntly, "is a terrible writer...

...Part of the fun of working at The New Le ader was its openness to new and relatively untested writers...

...He praised James Baldwin's first novel, the autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain, saying Baldwin had fulfilled his ambition of writing something more than a racially driven "protest novel...

...Salinger with praise that is not the least bit faint: "I think that Jerome David Salinger is the most talented fiction writer in America...

...Pearl K. Bell, who began writing for The New Leader in 1959, became the chief fiction critic in the issue of October 27,1969, and for the next seven years established a strong personal standard with her tough-minded, sharp and entertaining columns...

...Philip Roth at 29, had in Hyman's view "the finest eye for the details of American life since Sinclair Lewis...

...Of William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness, Janeway wrote that he "achieved effortlessly something that most writers find extremely difficult and too many ignore...

...This is, to plumb private emotion as it is felt privately in obscure half-articulate symbols and to communicate the weight of this emotion to the reader...

...as a result, his pieces for The New Leader were refreshingly free of political doctrine or prejudice...

...For writers like Wouk, book-form is an almost archaic survival, a not-quite-dispensable stage on the way to becoming a movie...

...Hilton Kramer, who was the NL's art critic in 1964, and then joined the magazine's staff as an associate editor, subsequently took on the book column...

...Reviewing The Master and Margarita he found Mikhail Bulgakov "a writer of an almost indelibly realistic turn of mind, with that valuable feeling for the opaqueness and substantiality of things, persons, ideas, which runs like iron through all of the best modem Russian writing...

...But this was not always the case: When the NL switched from a newspaper to a magazine format in mid-1950, the books it discussed still were primarily devoted to political affairs...

...An astute critic, she praised Ian McEwan's Atonement as "a dense, unsettling meditation on the interplay of imagination and reality, uneasy partners that injure each other...

...Looking back at his columns, and those of such successors as Stanley Edgar Hyman and Pearl K. Bell, has been something of an eye-opener for me...

...And Daniel James wrote of Invisible Man that Ralph Ellison "managed to transform a hitherto parochial theme—or a theme parochially treated as a rule—into a work of universal meaning...

...This is not to say that they are shy of happenings...

...Hyman's praise, on the rather rare occasions when he imparted it unstintingly, was always well-earned...

...Hyman damned the unclassifiable J.D...

...Apropos of John Irving's The Water-Method Man she wrote: "A depressing trend that can be observed in many novels today is the blithe indifference to any tangible subject...

...Inevitably, I missed many worthwhile books and had to content myself with reading appreciations of them by my NL colleagues...

...On one occasion the columnist William Henry Chamberlin, who did not usually address literary matters, could not resist responding to a poll naming the "Ten Most Boring Classics...

...James Rorty found Updike's The Poorhouse Fair "as clearly drawn, as unsentimental and as moving as a canvas by George Bellows...

...The latter is credited with offering "the most stringent account we have had ofthat academic perversion of criticism over which Jarrell, in the end, could only weep...

...The danger is garrulousness...

...It binds the novelist with the tightest new constraints, until he cannot even perform his primary function, which is to be interesting...

...however, she said, "I could grasp no clear sense of what her morally queasy, intolerably self-preoccupied vampire is meant to convey...

...Especially impressive in all of them is a quality I know to be elusive: the ability to pick, from the thousands of new books published each year, those that will have real value and significance years onward...

...And she considered E.L...

...John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman suffered from a similar diffusiveness: He has a theme and a target, she noted, but "he insists on being the bantering jester, the juggler of realities, the magician of words, obtruding himself with heavy-handed ironic narcissism into the structure of the narrative...

...grievously...

...Thomas Pynchon's first novel, V, was "powerful, ambitious, full of gusto, and overflowing with rich comic invention" but "raw and formless," full of self-indulgent "whimsy" and "garish fantasy...

...She thought Anne Rice's first novel, Interview with the Vampire, "strange and beautifully written...

...Stanley Edgar Hyman followed Hicks in the summer of 1961...

...but the books tend to remain mired in a swamp of kooky particulars set down with a maundering randomness that opts for charm rather than thought...

...She found Pynchon, Donald Barthelme and Joseph Heller guilty of this too, "Yet no one has let it all hang out with such self-hobbling fanaticism as Gaddis...

...Hicks even singled out an auspicious debut of a sort not regularly acknowledged in literary columns: Ian Fleming's Casino Royale, the first appearance of James Bond...

...Rosellen Brown reviewed Alexandra Styron's first novel, All the Finest Girls...

...With a keen eye for the artistically spurious and the merely fashionable, Hyman passed negative judgments as memorable as his positive ones...

...It took her 10 days, she related, to "struggle" through his JR, and she described a new genre of fiction "concerned less with imposing the author's imaginative and technical will upon experience than with the total reproduction of mundane existence, down to the most insignificant hmmm...

...He saw Bellow's Herzog, for example, as exemplifying the author's gifts and his excesses: "Bellow is a word-spinner, as a consequence of which the sources of his strength lie very close to the sources of his weakness...

...The fiction of Flannery O'Connor, for instance, presented in his opinion "the truest portrait of the South today that I know...

...Jack Gelber's On Ice was "not an offbeat novel but a junk sculpture...

...Bell's enthusiasm, when she bestowed it, was entirely infectious...

...often the novels that appeared the most important and heavyhitting seemed of less potential interest than more offbeat selections...

...Of Mailer's The Deer Park he wrote: "It is difficult to think of a book in which so many phrases and sentences are merely along for the ride...

...He accepted the inclusion of The Pilgrim's Progress, Moby-Dick, Pamela, and The Faerie Queen, but strenuously defended Faust and Boswell's Life of Johnson...

...although the South has changed almost beyond recognition since he wrote those words, the appraisal remains a sound one...

...but it explains why the book, which might easily be more than a comedy, isn't...

...Some of my favorites among the books I have written about for The New Leader are Jim Crace's Quarantine, Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full, Bellow's Ravelstein, Vladimir Voinovich's Monumental Propaganda (its farcical humor seemed to me underappreciated by most critics), Roth's The Plot Against America, Tom Bissell's God Lives in St...

...About Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar he said: "Such books as Marjorie appear in print only out of respect to the past, as a sentimental gesture...

...He has a compulsion to tell all, to overtell, to explain all, to explain away...

...Sarah Harrison Smith wrote about William Boyd's wonderful Any Human Heart and Colm Tóibin's The Master, Evan Hughes covered The Impressionist, Hari Kunzru's auspicious first novel, and Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude...

...Reviewing Irving Howe's Politics and the Novel, Hicks wrote that Howe "is far too intelligent to judge a novel by its ideology, but he feels that ideology must play a dominant part in a political novel...

...Regular NL fiction watchers who helped to maintain the consistently high quality of the magazine's book pages included Hope Hale Davis, Robert Gorham Davis, Tova Reich, Rosellen Brown, Seiden Rodman, and Simon Wincelberg...

...A novelist who tangles with the details of history can do so with impunity...

...In the early stages of their careers, Bellow, Baldwin, Richard Howard, Elizabeth Janeway, and Alfred Kazin wrote for the magazine...

...Daphne Merkin's pieces, from January 1978 to October 1981, included reviews of Mailer's The Executioner's Song ("a brilliant work, abounding in mesmerizingly grubby detail") and Joan Didion's The White Hotel...

...Didion, she observed, is "the purveyor of a very streamlined model of angst— Everything is pared down for maximal depressive effect...

...Hyman was adept at discerning the larger patterns in a writer's talent and career, of understanding the fine balances in any body of work...

...Indeed, its archives provide an unusual angle on a changing culture where literature, music, film, theater, and television became so interwoven with politics that they could not easily be left out of a political periodical...

...She admired the technique of The Rachel Papers and its "very young, monstrously bright, arrogantly articulate" author, the 24-year-old Martin Amis, but was disturbed by the book's moral focus or lack thereof...

...She found Jean Rhys' After Leaving Mr...

...But now, in his first novel, he has simply exploded, and the fireworks are a joy to watch...

...Hicks himself wasn't so sure: "Whether or not a political novel begins with an ideology, it comes sooner or later to the posing of a moral issue...

...the reader always remains detached...

...Although Mike Kolatch had access to some of the best literary journalists in America, he never lost his willingness to give young people a chance—and this, perhaps, is what I enjoyed most about my association with the magazine...

...He quickly recognized, too, the artistic breakthrough represented by The Adventures of Augie March: "Any reader of Dangling Man and The Victim knew that Saul Bellow was one of our able young writers, but there was nothing in the earlier books to prepare us for the abounding energy ofAugie March...

...The Crying of Lot 49 by Pynchon, who was already heading toward the cult status he would eventually achieve, Rosenthal described as "cute Gothic," and he deplored the author's "snide, rather shallow assault on the diseased and distorted aspects of American life...

...He wrote of Sybille Bedford's A Legacy: "If this is really Miss Bedford's first book, a remarkable talent has emerged full-fledged...

...That is scarcely a major shortcoming...

...I came t? The New Leader as a reviewer in 1997, and soon began to do the lead fiction column...

...In the case of The Wapshot Chronicle, he observed that John Cheever's short stories "have excelled in what one thinks of as the New Yorker vein: subdued, understated, non-euphoric...

...Hisreview of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood is a model of how a fair-minded critic should handle a literary approach he essentially disagrees with...

...The fiction column was manned in 1966-67 by Raymond Rosenthal, whose sensibilities had much in common with Hyman's...

...A well-known critic, New Yorker staff writer and Bennington College professor, he brought great erudition and verve to his "Writers & Writing" columns, and his judgments, like his predecessor's, have been more than borne out by posterity...

...Sometimes the more rewarding works were not novels at all—James Thurber's collected letters, for instance, or biographies of John Fowles and Anthony Burgess...

...But she chastised Orhan Pamuk for his "great deal of repetition" in My Name Is Red and his "erudition often delivered in huge chunks that clearly fascinate the writer more than they will the reader...

...It is interesting to see how contemporary critics greeted first novels by authors who later emerged as major figures...

...Kramer's treatment of other critics is worth revisiting, especially a later essay entitled "Criticism and History" (December 8,1969), contrasting Randall Jarrell and Philip Rahv...

...The New Leader revamped its "Writers & Writing" section in November 1951, with Granville Hicks as the lead critic...

...I wrote it up to this final issue, except for a hiatus in 2001 and 2002, when the novelist Lynne Sharon Schwartz replaced me...

...The progress of his Glass series in a little more than a decade from one of the finest short stories of our time, ? Perfect Day for Bananafish,' to one of the most boring ever written, 'Seymour: An Introduction,' is appalling...

...Bell, like Hicks, understood the novelist's task to be moral as well as aesthetic...

...Hicks was receptive to the efforts of new writers, giving young and unknown authors attention along with established masters, and it is surprising how many of those he singled out eventually became leading figures in their generation...

...It was my pleasure during my years here to recommend Smith, Kristen Case, and Mark Martin as reviewers...

...In 1950, literary journalism in The New Leader's pages was sparse, focusing on major books like Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination, Newton Arvin's Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway's Across the River and into the Woods...

...In 1952 Hicks called Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe "by far the best-informed novel about college life I have ever read...