Aroused by Books

Herbert Gold captured the importance of Broyard to me during my first several years in New York City: "For people of his generation and mine, living in the Village, Anatole was the image of the Bohemian writer. In his stories and his style, he was my idea of a hipster - and he was one of the first to write about hipsters. Anatole invented his life as he went along, and I admired him for his ironic sense of fun." Mr. Broyard worked as an editor of "The New York Times Book Review", previewing and assigning fiction books, for three years. Before then, he served as a daily book critic for nearly 15 years. Later he wrote a monthly essay, ''About Books,'' to "The New York Times Book Review", and compiled the unsigned column ''Noted With Pleasure.'' Broyard died of prostate cancer and the year before his death wrote: ''I thought that time had tapped me on the shoulder, that I had been given a deadline at last. It wasn't that I believed the cancer was going to kill me, even though it had spread beyond the prostate - it could probably be controlled, either by radiation or hormonal manipulation. No, what struck me was the startled awareness that one day something, whatever it might be, was going to interrupt my leisurely progress. It sounds trite, yet I can only say that I realized for the first time that I don't have forever.'' Broyard's reviews featured fiction and belles-lettres, areas of real weakness in my personal education. His obituary in "The Times" described his approach: he emphasized the "author's literary abilities and was particularly interested in the use of language.... Quotations from the works of European novelists and philosophers, some of them esoteric, regularly appeared in his reviews. For example, in a review of Alfred Kazin's ''Our New York'' published on Jan. 14, in The Times Book Review, Mr. Broyard quoted Nietzsche, Henry James, Walter Benjamin, Kafka, Cyril Connolly, Harold Rosenberg and Irving Howe." I've kept many of his reviews in my reading diary, and used them as a stepping stone to reading authors new to me. No critic, other than James Wood in books like How Fiction Works, have done so much to enrich my reading life. Broyard's life is fascinating in its own right, and he deserves a biography of his own. There seems to be growing interest in his career and his attempts to "pass as white." For example, Henry Louis Gates discusses how Broyard had concealed his African-American ancestry in an essay in his book Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, Broyard's daughter Bliss wrote about unravelling her family's secrets in One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets. His reviews are sometimes critized for their neoconservative bias and their occasional cruelties. Nonetheless, this collection of over a hundred of his reviews written during his strongest period as a reviewer are both entertaining and educational. Robert C. Ross 2009