Plausible Prejudices: Essays on American Writing

...Perhaps one of the reasons for the strength of the novel in South America just now is that novelists like Vargas Llosa, Garcia Marquez, and Carlos Fuentes spend most of their time in town...

...Augustan strictures do not suffice when dealing with this kind of work...

...His books are a pleasure to read, and now that he has flung his literary criticism between hard covers, readers of the contemporary novel have a place to go for intelligent talk about the boys and girls (as Epstein calls them), as well as the few grownups, who now write American fiction...

...Other items on Epstein's list of baleful influences are the "normalization of alienation"(a.k.a., the Void)- which, he argues, is based on a selective understanding of modernism-and the decline of places like New York and Chicago as centers of literary culture...

...It seems to me that there is a distinction to be made between "minor" and "second-rate" when discussing the novel, and that Epstein does not make it...

...Epstein's dealings with the novel...

...Where are I.B...

...you have to buy the cliches of people like Doctorow, Heller, Beattie, Coover, and Stone if you are going to find moral refreshment in their books...

...He deplores the politicizing of literature, yet the bulk of these essays were published in Commentary and the New Criterion, journals, it is fair to say, of the political and cultural right...

...Tristram Shandy did not last," Johnson remarked to Boswell...

...Politics, again, has done its corrosive work...

...There is a certain amount of headhunting going on...

...he prefers, for example, the work of the early left-wing Dos Passos to that of the right-wing Dos Passos...

...He complains in one essay that of the three hundred odd reviews his books have received, none contained any constructive criticism, so I am trying to oblige...

...Epstein is fully appreciative of Marquez's great gifts, but he is also the only critic I know to put his finger on the flaw that keeps Marquez out of the big leagues...

...late thirties: "Politics, everywhere destructive, have here dried up the place, frozen it, cracked it, and powdered it to dust...

...Like any first-rate critic, he has a larger purpose than simply turning over the book at hand...

...Epstein's main concern is with the novel...

...It is the left, not the right, which has politicized our culture, and you cannot fault a critic-one who is not peddling a program and simply wants to enjoy a book for its own sake-for trying to clear the air of political fumes...

...Also, the group of novelists to whom Epstein gives extended treatment is somehow selective...

...Epstein may be less than candid in not calling attention to the less-than-disinterested nature of his own critical operation...

...His essay on Garcia Marquez is far and away the best treatment I have read of that Colombian artificer...

...But it does have its limitations when it comes to writing about the novel...

...Or to read Doctorow, you have to view American capitalism as essentially exploitative and repressive...

...When these men picked up a pen, they were artists first and pamphleteers second...

...Garcia Marquez himself seems little interested in moral questions, or in the conflicts, gradations, and agonies of moral turmoil...

...There is little gravity in these works-but we do not wish them other than they are...

...Their politics- which, in Cowley's case, involved at one time the most embarrassing infatuation with Stalinism-are stamped like a watermark on every page they wrote...

...1 imagine that he feels like the narrator of a recent novel by Alasdair Gray: "1 am very sorry...

...When you sit down to read a contemporary novel, Epstein points out, too often you have to agree with the politics of the author in order to enjoy the book...

...The principal, the major, the overriding and overwhelming fact about American writing between the end of World War II and the present," he writes, "is its nearly complete absorption by American universities...

...Epstein, of course, is not the only critic to be embarrassed by what passes these days for serious writing...

...Epstein's reaction to a writer like Updike could be more modulated...

...In the sixteenth century human life was disordered and talent stultified by the obsession of theology...

...What does he make of Thomas McGuane's The Bushwacked Piano or Donald Bar-thelme's short stories...

...Epstein is a conservative, but he does not judge a writer by his politics...

...it is full of freaks and gargoyles and is utterly lacking in seriousness...

...today we are plague stricken by politics...

...But the word "occasional" hardly does justice to the sort of reviews and essays that Mr...

...As a result, we have had the gross inflation of the reputation of a writer like Virginia Woolf (feminist and suffering lesbian) and the undervaluation of a writer like Willa Cather, whose views are deemed not sufficiently feminist- although, Epstein notes, recent biographical speculation has cleared a place for Cather as an "honorary lesbian...

...This being the case, I find the following complaint by William Pritchard, in his review of this book in the New York Times Book Review, hard to fathom: "Mr...

...Oddly, in Garcia Marquez's fiction morality is never an issue...

...But it did last, and I see no evidence in Epstein's writing of an allowance for this element of play in the novel...

...He is concerned with politics only to the extent that they trivialize a writer's work...

...Naipaul...

...He blames this on the intrusion of politics, not specifically the electoral kind, but any scheme of ideas-Marxism, feminism, Freudian psychology-which tries to reduce human reality to simple formulas...

...Fortunately, however, for those who care about the quality of our literary culture, Mr...

...I would like to ignore politics but POLITICS WILL NOT LET ME ALONE...

...He alludes favorably to some of these writers in passing, but I think a full discussion of one or two of them would have made the collection more rounded...

...Even when he reviews a dim novel by Philip Roth or John Irving, we get a charming and perspicacious discussion of the novelist's oeuvre and the cultural issues that it raises...

...I do have some complaints about this part of the book...

...But 1 don't know of any other writer who can explain with such lucidity why our cultural life has come to such a pass...

...Where once a young novelist might have learned about life working on a newspaper- as did Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway-he is now more likely to learn about it through a creative-writing program...

...This is not true of Epstein, who simply objects to the invasion of a writer's imagination by politics of any kind...

...Epstein's charm, however, does not belie the severity of his views about contemporary literature...

...but he rightly condemns any writer who cannot free himself of ideology...

...They are all writers who have in some way misused their gifts and thus illustrate Epstein's "case...

...Leavis's favorite word) in the history of the form which runs from Tristram Shandy through At Swim-Two-Birds and the novels of Ronald Firbank...

...Epstein writes...

...And, contrary to the implication of Pritchard's remarks, Epstein always makes full disclosure of his political opinions...

...But contemporary novelists do not seem able to transcend ideology when they turn on their word processors...

...There is a line (to borrow F.R...

...Reverse cultural discrimination has spread to every organ of literary culture, be it prize committees or Sunday book supplements, and, as a result, says Epstein, our culture has come "to look a little like the Democratic Party under George McGovern...

...Epstein is a man with an argument, and the point he drives home again and again is that much of our literature has been reduced to a flea market of received ideas...

...Then, there is another kind of omission in Mr...

...it is not necessary to subscribe to the virulent opinions of Dostoyevsky or Malraux in order to enjoy The Possessed or Man's Fate...

...This is not true of the great novelists of the past...

...a large section of Plausible Prejudices comprises reviews of living novelists, and Epstein's discussions are both comprehensive and just...

...its practitioners approach the novel as a sport, not as moral gymnastics...

...Norton/$17.95 George Sim Johnston Viewing the overproduction of books and pamphlets in his own day, Samuel Johnson complained of "an epidemical conspiracy for the destruction of paper...

...My case," he writes, "is that literature is going through a very bad patch at present-that there is something second-rate about it, especially in America, though not here alone...

...Most American writers, he points out, now live in universities...

...Powers, Milan Kundera, Saul Bellow, and V.S...

...Next to politics, in Epstein's view, the university earns the largest share of blame for the decline of American letters...

...I have not touched on half of Joseph Epstein's virtues as a critic and essayist...

...Nothing odd will do long...

...He might also have pointed out that those American novelists who have not left the city for the university have left it for the sticks...

...and, indeed, it would be difficult to imagine Balzac or Thackeray moving to Cornish, New Hampshire...

...And what about less-than-major writers who fully realize their gifts within strict, self-imposed limits...

...In the first category are writers like Malcolm Cowley and Dwight Macdonald, whose literary judgments are often vitiated by political motives...

...As a result, much of our fiction is "not really intended for use outside of an English department...

...Singer, Eudora Welty, J.F...

...How about a younger writer like Mark Helprin...

...This is but a cavil...

...To read Ann Beattie at any great length, for example, you have to agree with her that people who went to college in the sixties and still get stoned while listening to Dylan records are vastly superior to the middle class swine around them...

...Writers are often taught, not for their intrinsic merits, but because they are feminist or black or possess other extra-literary qualities...

...The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa recently wondered in an interview why so many American novelists live in the country...

...In addition to holding our novelists and poets like Indians on a reservation, the academy has diminished the appreciation of literature by its total surrender to political fashion...

...Plausible Prejudices is a collection of his occasional literary writings, most of which first appeared in the New Criterion and Commentary...

...True, Updike has never come close to writing an important novel, but he has produced some wonderful short stories and essays, including one of the best pieces ever written about baseball, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu...

...Epstein has not abstained from swelling the torrent of critical prose...

...Lionel Trilling, in a famous phrase, talked about the "bloody crossroads where politics and literature meet...

...I don't believe we would hear from him on the subject if the other side kept its politics to itself...

...The reason for this, I suspect, is that for him the moral universe is already set-for him, as for so many revolutionary intellectuals, there are the moral grievances of the past, the moral hypocrisies of the present, and, waiting over the horizon, the glories of the future, when moral complexity will be abolished...

...His approach to literature is essentially Augustan-meaning that he looks primarily for moral seriousness and intellectual gravity in a work of art-and this is fine so far as it goes, particularly given the antinomian strain in much contemporary writing...

...His protest against the effect that ideology has had on the literary imagination reminds me of Evelyn Waugh's description of Mexico in the George Sim Johnston is a writer living in New York...

...Joseph Epstein, who as a critic has much in common with the man who told Boswell to "clear your mind of cant," feels the same way about the volume of literary criticism today...

...Epstein-quite against his will, it seems to me-stands at those crossroads and says with a shrug "Well, a man is entitled to his opinions...

...Professor Pritchard fails to make a distinction between leftists who happen to be critics, and a critic who happens to be a conservative...