Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays

by Cynthia Ozick Narrated by Donna Postel

Overview

If every outlet for book criticism suddenly disappeared-if all we had were reviews that treated books like any other commodity-could the novel survive? In a gauntlet throwing essay at the start of this brilliant assemblage, Cynthia Ozick stakes the claim that, just as surely as critics require a steady supply of new fiction, novelists need great critics to build a vibrant community on the foundation of literary history. For decades, Ozick herself has been one of our great critics, as these essays so clearly display. She offers models of critical analysis of writers from the mid-twentieth century to today, from Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Kafka, to William Gass and Martin Amis, all assembled in provocatively named groups: Fanatics, Monsters, Figures, and others. Uncompromising and brimming with insight, these essays are essential reading for anyone facing the future of literature in the digital age.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

03/14/2016
This essay collection from novelist (Foreign Bodies) and literary critic Ozick takes a fresh look at renowned writers of the past and present. She sorts the authors under consideration into different categories, including “Critics” (such as Edmund Wilson), “Figures” (such as Bernard Malamud and W.H. Auden), “Monsters” (such as Leo Baeck and Harold Bloom), and “Souls” (such as William Gass and Martin Amis). Ozick illuminates argument through juxtaposition. Thus, essays by Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus are seen as seeking, but not finding, “an infrastructure of serious criticism.” Lionel Trilling, “the most celebrated critic of his time,” is seen here through the lens of his fiction, and Saul Bellow through his letters rather than his novels. A piece on Kafka is partly biographical essay and partly exploration of the nature of biography. Hebrew, as language and identity marker, takes center stage for a public conversation between Marilynne Robinson and Robert Alter at the 92nd Street Y, forging links to Ozick’s recurring theme of Jewish identity, and to her last section devoted to Holocaust literature. The Beat Generation comes in for a bit of scolding along the way, but Ozick opens more doors than she closes. “Serious criticism is surely a form of literature,” she posits, and serious readers will agree and find it practiced here. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency. (July)

From the Publisher

"“A sorceress of silken prose, wholly incapable of platitude, of cliché, of even the stray dead phrase, Ozick can make anything happen with a sentence.”—The New Republic

"A forceful and witty collection of literary criticism by a brilliant critic and novelist."—Shelf Awareness

"Often intricate and lovely leaves from the author's literary tree."—Kirkus Reviews

"'Serious criticism is surely a form of literature,' she posits, and serious readers will agree and find it practiced here."—Publishers Weekly

DECEMBER 2016 - AudioFile

This audiobook will open doors. For listeners familiar with Cynthia Ozick’s brilliant criticism, these essays affirm that status. For those unfamiliar with Ozick’s criticism, this audiobook serves as an excellent introduction. Although narrator Donna Postel doesn’t sound like Ozick, whose actual voice is as memorable as her writing, Postel’s performance brings out the author’s literary voice with the right mix of wit, inflection, and hyperbole. In doing so, Postel’s varied yet consistently low-key delivery complements the wide range of topics the book covers, including Ozick’s perspectives on a variety of authors such as Saul Bellow, Martin Amis, and Franz Kafka. D.J.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2016-04-30
A veteran and venerated literary essayist, critic, and novelist collects some recent (some previously unpublished) reviews and essays.For each of the terms in her title, Ozick (Foreign Bodies, 2010, etc.), a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, offers a brief essay of explanation and even elaboration, and throughout, she delights with her almost Emersonian aphorisms. In her section on "Monsters," for example, which deals with the oddness of writers, she writes (alluding to Flaubert) that she will be considering "the condition of the writer as a deformed outlier." Virtually every page of this strong collection features something memorable, and several significant figures appear more than once, mostly writers and fellow critics whom she admires: Kafka, Harold Bloom, Saul Bellow, and William Gass (whose sentences "are most exhilaratingly ingenious when they venture into unexpected and dizzying keys, diving from vernacular directness into an atonal Niagaran deluge"), among others. Ozick also deals with some key issues in the literary world—the difficulties of translation, the differences between a critic and a reviewer (she places herself firmly among the former and goes off on what she sees as facile and ignorant "reviews" posted on Amazon and on other sites—and notes with sadness how quickly literary figures pass away from the public mind when they die. More than once, she mentions Norman Mailer as a case in point. She doesn't think Bellow has suffered such a fate, but this may be more her wish than a fact. Ozick's pieces are also rigorously intellectual. Readers will need some patience and considerable knowledge to keep up with her in her essays about Kafka and Auden and Gass. Often intricate and lovely leaves from the author's literary tree.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171446604
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	07/05/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Authors are partial to their Wit, ’tis true.
But are not Criticks to their Judgment too?
. . . Those monsters, Criticks!
— Alexander Pope,
“An Essay on Criticism,” 1711
 
Critics
 George Orwell and Edmund Wilson are emblematic names that have come down to us from the still ticking heart of the twentieth century​ — ​literary names that carry meaning. Speak of Orwell, and what reverberates is monitory: Animal Farm and 1984, each a forceful parable of totalitarian oppression. But Orwell was also renowned as a sonorous essayist, one who is nowadays not much read beyond the campus, where “Shooting an Elephant” is a mainstay of the college anthologies. Except for Animal Farm, his fiction fails to attract ongoing notice​ — ​least of all Keep the Aspidistra Flying, long ago interred among the forgotten social novels of the 1930s. And apart from Orwell specialists, who now reads The Road to Wigan Pier? Yet Big Brother and Newspeak and memory hole are so ingrained in the common idiom that for many it hardly seems necessary to trouble to turn the already familiar pages of 1984. None of this matters; what counts is the echo of Orwell’s name and the bleakness it evokes: dread; deception; injustice; anomie; soullessness. Orwell has become Orwellian.

Edmund Wilson germinates no parallel verbal progeny: Wilsonian, if it suggests anything, characterizes the policies of an American president. We have no single term​ — ​no summarizing atmospheric word​ — ​for America’s preeminent critic, who has no peer and may never be surpassed. He encompassed worlds: he wrote on the Iroquois, on an ancient Hebrew religious sect, on Russian philology, on the French Symbolists, on the evolution of radical political movements from Robespierre to the Bolsheviks, on the Civil War; he wrote on Canada and on Haiti, on citizenship and taxation, on movies and theater, on poets and novelists, on historical figures and on his contemporaries. He also wrote​ — ​critically​ — ​on literary criticism.

In 1928, in an acerbic and dismissive essay titled “The Critic Who Does Not Exist,” he complained of the lack of serious literary criticism in the United States. “A work of art,” he said, “is not a set of ideas or an exercise of technique, or even a combination of both. But I am strongly disposed to believe that our contemporary writing would benefit by a genuine literary criticism that should deal expertly with ideas and art. . . . In a sense, it can probably be said that no such creature exists as a full-time literary critic​ — ​that is, a writer who is at once first-rate and nothing but a literary critic.” Wilson, of course, was that creature, and today there are a number of first-rate writers of criticism who are at work full-time; but are there enough to make what can be called an expansive literary culture?

If we isolate only one decade of the many Wilson dominated​ — ​the 1920s, say​ — ​the extent and variety of his perceptions and preoccupations astonish. It is as if Wilson were not one critic but scores of critics, all working separately in their respective specialties. His “All-Star Literary Vaudeville” is an essay that ranges over dozens of writers, most of them durably familiar to their posterity​ — ​Dreiser, Mencken, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson​ — ​though some, like Carl Van Vechten and Joseph Hergesheimer, today seem no more visible than distant ghosts. Between 1924 and 1928 alone, Wilson rounded up his reflections on Houdini, Poe, dialect and slang, e. e. cummings, Woodrow Wilson’s years at Princeton, Ring Lardner, Eugene O’Neill, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Byron’s mistresses, subjects such as “the humility of common sense” and “the trouble with American comedy,” John Dos Passos, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Henry James, Upton Sinclair, a Prohibition-era speakeasy; and much more, all in seamlessly lucid prose.

It should be understood​ — ​it should be trumpeted​ — ​that not one of these essays is dated. Not one is infected by staleness. Wilson’s achievement rises beyond reviewing, giving the news, assessing his time. Read him now and see the lineaments of a civilization; he reproduces nothing less. The critic has become a historian.

And here is the shock of it. Wilson stands as a kind of symbol​ — ​far more than a literary model to aspire to. He is what current lingo, falling into the tedium of overuse, terms an “icon,” the embodiment of an indissoluble fame. And like Orwell, whose repute​ — ​whose meaning​ — ​is similarly enduring, he is not read. Admired, honored, influential, legendary; rumored, but not read. Which brings us, alarmingly, to the Orwellian: the dying of the imagination through the invisibility of the past. As for the uses of criticism by the denizens of the present moment: envisioning society whole by way of the contemplation of its parts, the delicate along with the tumultuous, the weighty together with the trifling, is how a culture can learn to imagine its own face.

Without the critics, incoherence.
 
 
The Boys in the Alley, The Disappearing Readers, and the Novel’s Ghostly Twin
 
“On or about December 1910,” Virginia Woolf wrote more than one hundred years ago, “human character changed.” The phrase has come down to us mockingly, notoriously, but also with the truth-like endurance of a maxim. By a change in human character, Woolf meant modernism, and by modernism she meant the kind of overt self-consciousness that identifies and interrogates its own motions and motives. Set forth in “Character in Fiction,” an essay arguing for innovation in the novel, it was an aesthetic rather than an essentialist proposition. The change​​ — ​​a new dispensation of premise and utterance​ — ​had been wickedly heralded two years before, on an August afternoon in 1908, when Lytton Strachey happened to notice a stain on Woolf’s sister’s skirt. “Semen?” Strachey inquired, as definitively as the final squeal of a hinge: a door flung shut for the last time. Behind that door lurked the muzzled premodern, and before it swarmed what modernism has long since made of us (and postmodernism even more so): harriers of the hour, soothsayers and pulse-takers, augurs and dowsers, examiners of entrails. Literary entrails especially: many are the stains subject to writerly divination.

And so it was that on or about April 1996, Jonathan Franzen published a manifesto on the situation of the contemporary novelist (with himself as chief specimen and proof text), and the character of bookish querulousness changed. What had been muttered mutely in cenacles and bars erupted uninhibitedly in print, as flagrante delicto as any old spot of early-twentieth-century semen. The Corrections, Franzen’s ambitious and celebrated literary bestseller, had not yet appeared; he was still a mostly obscure fiction writer whose two previous novels, though praised by reviewers, had slid into the usual quicksand of forgotten books. When a little-known writer undertakes a manifesto​ — ​a statement, after all, of sober purpose and principle​ — ​it is likely also to be a cri de coeur, and its reasoned argument will derive from the intimate wounds of autobiography. “I’d intended to provoke; what I got instead,” Franzen said of his first novel, “was sixty reviews in a vacuum.” Even sixty reviews, he made plain, was not sufficient: it was not equivalent to a public event, attention was not being paid, certainly not in the coin of genuine Fame, and the vacuum in question was the airlessness of writer’s depression.

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