A fine, accessible collection worthy of Dickstein’s former CUNY mentor, Irving Howe.
Twenty illuminating essays published over the decades on literature’s elusive, prophetic interpretations of a changing American society.
In his title piece, Dickstein (Distinguished Professor of English/CUNY Graduate Center; Double Agent: The Critic and Society, 1992, etc.) explains that the “mirror in the roadway” reflects Stendhal’s metaphor in Le Rouge et le noir that a novel is like a mirror carried along a highway, sometimes reflecting the sky, sometimes the mud in the road—and consequently you can’t blame the puddle for the mire but “the road inspector who lets the water stagnate and the puddle form.” The novel has a social function, and Dickstein explores it, beginning with the early mythmakers of urban centers New York (Poe, Whitman, Dos Passos, Melville, James, Ellison) and “Second City” Chicago (Dreiser, Richard Wright, James T. Farrell, Bellow). In considering the rise of American Realism, he argues that Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) truly “changed the course of history,” not only by exposing the unconscionable practices of the meat-packing industry, but also by revealing perhaps for the first time the “inner humanity of those trapped by birth or occupation near the bottom of the social hierarchy.” Dickstein has a facile ability to convey the great swath of literary criticism in a most readable fashion, sans clunky jargon, such as in “Edmund Wilson: Three Phrases,” where he explores the reasons this notably prickly critic continues to engage contemporary readers. Dickstein offers a cogent argument for reevaluating the work of Fitzgerald (“The Authority of Failure”) as a writer whose “reverses” made him more introspective, as well as more interesting to read. Other authors Dickstein reevaluates, moving from realism to modernism, include Mary McCarthy, Kafka and Raymond Carver. Céline (thanks to a 1966 translation) receives credit for the explosion of American vernacular, while “The Complex Fate of the Jewish American Writer” is a most thoughtful essay on American identity.
A fine, accessible collection worthy of Dickstein’s former CUNY mentor, Irving Howe.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-691-11996-1
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
In parts memoir, travelogue, political treatise, and extended essay on the tangled question of what it means to be a Jew living outside of Israel. The founders of the state of Israel had hoped that all Jews would come ``home'' after some 2,000 years of exile. Yet 46 years after the birth of the state, less than half the world's Jews live there, and fewer Jews live in Israel than in the United States. Richler (Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!, 1992, etc.) offers no startling new insights into this phenomenon or into the growing split between Israeli Jews and those living in what is called the Diaspora. What he does offer is an intensely personal account of two journeys: one, of a teenager in Montreal who becomes an ardent Zionist in the years leading up to the creation of Israel in 1948; and two, of a Diaspora Jew in his 60s who visits Israel in 1992, measuring the state against his idealistic dreams of decades before, and measuring himself against the Israelis who had once been his teenage comrades in Canada. Making it clear that his sympathies lie with the left, Richler offers a clear picture of the modern state and its highly charged politics, based on numerous interviews and extensive reading. The more interesting parts of the book, however, have to do with Richler's personal engagement with Israel, even as he defends his choice to live in Canada. When a journalist tells Richler that he left the US because in Israel ``I am at home,'' Richler writes, ``But many of us, unapologetically Jewish, do feel at home in North America, the most open of societies.'' It is Richler's passionate, personal wrestling with this issue that sets this book apart from many others on the subject. A provocative and highly readable exploration of Israel in the mind of a Jew who has chosen not to live there, of interest primarily to other Jews aware that they have made the same decision.
Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-43610-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An informed and gloomy appraisal of the prospects for democracy in Russia from the longtime Moscow corespondent of the (Manchester) Guardian, who concludes that the present political system may be one of the many revolutions from above in Russian history that end in failure. Steele (Andropov in Power, 1983, etc.) derives his conclusion both from Russian history and from his own experiences as a correspondent. He makes the telling observation that, when Yeltsin stood on a tank to proclaim his resistance to the attempted coup in 1991, the crowd that applauded him was fewer than 200 in number; only when the coup was safely over did huge crowds emerge. The coup failed, Steele says, not because of mass resistance but because the plotters lost their nerve and the Army commanders split. Nor is he impressed by the ability of Russians to run a democratic system. Yeltsin's contempt for the Supreme Soviet—the majority of which originally supported him—was such that he refused for almost a year to appear before it or to meet with its leaders. He believes that Yeltsin deliberately provoked the hard-line faction in the Parliament into an injudicious response, which gave him an excuse to use the Army. Yeltsin also manipulated the constitutional referendum held at the same time as the election in 1993 to prevent opposition to its approval and to increase his own power. Steele's conclusions are not entirely pessimistic: He believes that considerable freedom has already been established and that the gains that have been made cannot be entirely reversed. Overall, however, he sees Russia as a ``society without law'' and he questions whether the country will not take ``a long time to evolve towards genuine democracy, if ever.'' Steele is better on contemporary events than on history, and better on politics than on society at large, but his deep knowledge of Russia over the last three decades gives his conclusions great and worrisome authority.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-674-26837-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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