American Fictions (Modern Library Paperbacks)

This book contains 27 of Hardwick's literary critical essays--and they are gems. The essays are arranged in themes (e.g., "Old New York," "Victims and Victors") around particular authors (e.g., Edith Wharton, Henry James, the Prairie poets, and so forth). Her essays concern novelists and short-story writers, but she has several essays on those who come from poetry, drama, and non-fiction prose. Her introductory essay, "Locations," is worth the price of the book alone.Elizabeth Hardwick writes so fluently that you find her drawing imaginative comparisons, remarkable analogies, and passionate connections. She strikes me as forgiving the personal foibles and erratic paths of some writers, while she searches for how these informed the writings. My favorite essay was her commentary on the American novelist Joan Didion ("In the Wasteland"), whose "unconsoling" work is "a carefully designed frieze on the fracture and splinter of her characters' comprehension of the world," marked by a peculiar unease and restlessness. Yet she also considers "older" American novelists (Melville, even has comments on Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Wharton). Her essays about more modern writers (the loss of bearing, from Fitzgerald's Gatsby to Capote's murderers, to Mailer's squalid "real" life) are also remarkable.I am puzzled that Hardwick has no essays about American protest literature, or any reformulation images. She does not write about any African-American writer, and I wonder about this omission. Is she saying implicitly that these writers have no location in American literature?

How seldom one finds readable, perceptive criticism that does what it's supposed to: enhance one's pleasure and understanding of the original work. The New Yorker comparison to Kael is apt; Hardwick's criticism is itself high art. These are collections of previous essays. The very best are those on "Bartleby", "Washington Square" and "House of Mirth". Excellent!