There is no inherent reason why what is called "academic criticism" cannot be of interest to non-academic readers. Certainly the formalist approach of New Criticism, which offers the reader a more focused perspective on the way a work of literature produces its effects, as well as an older-style historical criticism, which offers a view of the work's affiliations with other writing of the period and with the ideas and assumptions characteristic of the period itself, could be of interest to the general reader, although even when these critical methods were ascendant, academic critics were often enough perceived as too far removed from ordinary readers's concerns. Whether or not this perception was in some cases justified, certainly the strategy of "close reading" associated with the New Critics has persisted as a valid critical principle even among general-interest book reviewers, and if current literary culture can't be called rigorous in its adherence to shared critical standards, it does retain at least some residual allegiance to the idea that works of literature, including new works, deserve, and can withstand, some degree of conscientious explication and analysis.

On the other hand, academic criticism in its current form, the form dominant in most academic journals and the most prestigious academic presses, is not likely to be of interest or use to readers interested in how criticism might help to sharpen the reading experience. While academic critics still often profess to be offering a "close reading" of a text, it is usually not a reading intended to illuminate the work in such a way that readers might approach it more fruitfully. Not only is the interest the critic takes in the work likely to be from a narrow perspective centered on politics, history, or social context, but the political considerations won't simply concern the political background of the author or subject, and the historical and social analysis won't primarily situate the work in its time to assist understanding or clarify themes and implicit assumptions, all of which could still contribute to a more informed reading experience. Instead, the political agenda will the critic's own, as a part of which critical analysis is intended, while historical, social, and cultural forces will themselves be the critic's ultimate focus, not the way these forces shape the aesthetic character of a poem, a novel, or a writer's work as a whole.  "Literary theory" may be offered, but there won't be much that's literary about it.

Of course, very little that is actually offered to general readers in book reviews, magazines, or trade publishing could be called academic criticism. Via the latter, the only attention given to literature is through biographies of writers, which in turn become the prompt for what passes as literary criticism in periodicals such as the New York Review of Books, noodling essays in which the reviewer makes sweeping statements about a writer's work, often simply repeating the conventional wisdom, while otherwise mostly recapitulating whatever biography is under review. In this context, Michael Gorra's Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Massterpiece is a welcome and potentially important book. The title suggests the book will be a work of criticism elucidating the first of James's "major" novels, Portrait of a Lady, but in elucidating the novel Gorra draws on James's life experiences as well, so that the book could be described as criticism informed by biography or as the rare kind of biography that is also credible as literary criticism.

For the most part, Gorra focuses on the years during which James is working on Portrait, but he also ranges throughout James's life, considering episodes and events that informed the development of James's sense of himself as a writer, culminating in Portrait of a Lady, the book most critics and scholars have long identified as the first truly "Jamesian" of his novels, as well as the direction of James's life and work following Portrait,  including discussions of his final novels, which in many ways show the techniques and concerns found in the earlier novel extended even more radically and exhaustively. Gorra also chronicles James's relationships with important people in his life, such as brother William and friend Constance Fenimore Woolson, whose romantic feelings for James went unrequited. Gorra judiciously handles the question of James's sexuality, allowing that circumstantial evidence suggests James's sexual desires were likely homoerotic, while also acknowledging there is no actual evidence that he ever acted on those desires (or that he ever acted on any sexual desires at all).

Readers interested in a biography of James should get enough emphasis on the life to satisfy their curiosity, perhaps thus making Gorra's exposition of the genesis of Portrait of a Lady and extended analysis of the text itself more palatable, especially as Gorra does about as good a job as it's possible to do in showing how biography can help us at times to appreciate a writer's work. James's experiences as a voluntary exile in Europe can clarify his development of the "international theme," the portrayal of Americans encountering the "old world" of Europe, while learning that Portrait of a Lady's protagonist, Isabel Archer, is in part based on James's "favorite" cousin, Minny Temple, might help explain why he chose to focus on a female protagonist in this first really complex treatment of the theme and perhaps provide insight into the perceived authorial attitude toward Isabel.

Still, Gorra implicitly recognizes the limitations of biographical criticism in making his book not about Henry James but his novel, one which Gorra believes is among the best and most significant novels in American literature. Ultimately his goal is to enhance our appreciation of this novel (and indirectly of Henry James as a fiction writer), in the most old-fashioned sense to account for its greatness. What Gorra has really produced in Portrait of a Novel is a work of critical eclecticism. He borrows from a number of critical approaches, including some of those currently ascendant in academic criticism, as well as more traditional "scholarly" concerns, and in the process demonstrates how criticism can draw on a variety of ways of thinking about literature as a phenomenon of human expression and culture in order to satisfy the ultimate goal of providing a clarifying perspective on a morally and aesthetically complex work of literature.

In this way, Portrait of a Novel is at least as important for what it represents as a work of criticism as it as a specific commentary on Henry James's novel. Which is not say the commentary on the novel Gorra provides isn't insightful, in some ways definitive, offering a reading of Portrait of a Lady that situates it in its time and place and in it's author's body of work, and that explicates its formal and thematic particulars in a style that does justice to the novel's complexity and could appeal to dedicated Jamesians, while also making the analysis accessible to more casual readers of James. In a typically pellucid passage, Gorra considers Isabel's decision to turn down the marriage proposal offered by Lord Warburton:

When Warburton proposes, Isabel recognizes that she has stepped into a scene she has read too many times before. She may not yet understand just what she wants, but she does recognize that this scene's very familiarity stands in itself as a reason to say no. She rejects the plot that other people might write for her, and insists instead that she must be free to choose, free to make her own mistakes. Her choice here may even be the right one, though that doesn't mean it will lead to happiness. For Isabel cannot escape the fate she seems to crave, the fate that waits to test her in the book's 500 remaining pages. Nor can we. However much we may want to live on in the world of green lawns, we have to recognize that James has made a different and less comfortable plot around this particular woman. . . .

If this account provides insight into Isabel's character, and thus into the "500 remaining pages" of the novel for which she serves as protagonist, it also exemplifies a certain kind of critical discourse, focused on "the text itself," which it is intended to illuminate, but free of acadamese and external agenda, accessible to any serious reader while foregoing the effort to popularize Henry James for a "broader" audience that probably doesn't exist. James is indisputably a sometimes difficult writer (Portrait of a Lady somewhat less so than, say, The Golden Bowl), and it is a difficulty that astute criticism can help to ameliorate, but James is never going to appeal to all readers, nor does criticism to be worthwhile need to make works of literature equally valuable to all.

Gorra also abstains from personalizing his consideration of Portrait of a Lady, from providing "more Gorra" as this reviewer bizarrely wanted him to do. If biography has replaced criticism as the most widely available form of engagement with literature and literary history, the aimlessly subjective focus on the critic's random thoughts and vague impressions has become increasingly more conspicuous in the only remaining form of periodical criticism, the book review. While the emphasis on subjective response is consistent enough with an egocentric American culture, it reduces criticism to the means of recording the critic's idiosyncratic (and often opaque) expressions of "feeling." That Michael Gorra admires Portrait of Lady greatly, that it has had a profound effect on the way he thinks about both life and literature, is perfectly evident, but he translates his personal admiration into a critical language that is descriptive rather than emotional, that registers the novel's palpable effects, not his own intangible fancies.

Our current literary culture could certainly benefit from more books like Portrait of Novel, books that avoid both the intellectual trendiness and abstraction of academic criticism and the undisciplined impressionism of popular criticism. We need popular criticism to be more than biographies overstuffed with trivial details of writers' lives at the expense of greater understanding of their work, an understanding conventional biographies simply can't provide. We need the sort of "in-between" criticism Gorra provides in this book, which could serve as a model for critics who are willing to indulge some of our apparent need for biographical context while keeping the focus on the art the writer made from his/her life. One innovative book does not a trend make, but anyone following up on Gorra's lead would be taking another step toward reviving literary criticism.

Rohan Maitzen, herself a long-time proponent and distinguished practitioner of "academic blogging," recently wondered whether the "hope for the beneficent effects of blogging" expressed by many of the earliest champions of academic litblogging (including, it must be said, me) "fizzled out, or [was]. . .(even to a minor extent) realized." Rohan's own answer to her question is, generally, that this hope has not been realized, observing that "I haven’t seen much change in the way things operate generally in the academy, and if anything, the number of bloggers actively promoting a significant shift in the way we understand scholarship and publishing seems to have declined."

I mostly agree with Rohan's assessment, at least where what could specifically be called academic blogging is concerned. She cites a few pieces written by John Holbo, the founder and editorial mastermind of The Valve, arguably the first academic literary blog to gain a large readership (and to which both Rohan and I were contributors), that established fairly ambitious goals for academic litblogging, although Holbo more or less advocated for litblogging as a kind of "complement" or "supplement" to academic criticism, an "informal discussion of academic work" that to a degree exists as a second-order sort of discourse that makes "academic work" more accessible. Some contributors to The Valve did indeed post such "bloggy" discussions of literature and literary issues (informed but informal), but there have been few if any subsequent blogs that have really attempted to emulate or extend the style of academic blogging introduced at The Valve. There are many academics who blog, but, by and large, not about literature.

However, my own interest in blogging always was and is in the possibilities of the blog itself as a form of critical discourse, as a mode of serious literary criticism. In creating The Reading Experience, I was attempting to move away from academic criticism per se and try out a different sort of approach that would retain some of the assumptions of academic criticism (as I understood them) but would assume as audience readers beyond other "specialists" in a "field." For several years it seemed to me I was having some success in this endeavor, as TRE gradually built up a fairly decent "hit count" (my page visits were never as impressive as those received by the most popular of the early litblogs, but looking back now the numbers seem prodigious) and garnered my share of external links. In addition, more and more blogs were attempting the same sort of thing I was doing (including Rohan Maitzen), and while I can by no means claim that my blog was itself the inspiration for this increase, as there were certainly other blogs contemporaneous to mine featuring criticism of substance, I think it is fair to say that the notion that a lowly blog might feature such criticism is not at all as peculiar as it might have seemed to some in 2004.

Literary blogs as well, it seems to me, prompted the rise of other websites that were not, strictly speaking, blogs but that certainly took advantage of the audience for serious book discussion blogs had helped to create. Thus, online publications such as The Rumpus, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Open Letters Monthly could be said to be the legitimate heirs to literary blogs (other publications, such as The Quarterly Conversation and The Critical Flame, are direct offshoots of blogs), and it really can't be denied that literary criticism and commentary online in general is much more substantive and self-sustaining than it was ten years ago. This is not to say blogs in the form they took ten years ago have carried the day as the primary source of criticism in current literary culture, but surely that culture has changed because of the rise of the literary weblog.

But in her post Rohan Maitzen expresses less concern for the present literary culture than for the institutional practices of "academic literary studies," fearing that "there has proved to be too much inertia in the larger system to which academic scholarship and publication belong" for blogging to become much of a part of that system. Undoubtedly her fear is justified. "Academic" literary blogging defined more narrowly hasn't blossomed except in isolated cases, most prominently in the kinds of posts Rohan has written on her own blog. I would argue that not only inertia is to blame, however. It's not just that academic advancement depends on quantification of achievement (how many articles, how many books?) but that such quantification can be accomplished much more directly when the achievement is embodied in a physical object–the printed journal, the book bound between its tangible covers.

More importantly, not only are academic critics most often preoccupied with their own "area" of specialization, but these areas are usually centered around questions–historical, cultural, political, theoretical–ancillary to literature per se. Academic bloggers so often turn for subjects to the vicissitudes of the academic life itself because ultimately very many of them just aren't that interested in discussing literature.

It seems safe to say that Literature as an identifiable category of writing the characteristics of which can be specified and defended has never been under greater suspicion. Even those who still believe that the term has not been emptied of all of its meaning must finally concede that, yes, the concept of "literature" is to an extent a social construction, that what gets counted as literature is subject to historical shifts and is ultimately determined by contemporaneous social and cultural assumptions. Works of literature and the standards we use to judge them can never actually be timeless or universal in the casual sense in which he often use these words.

And yet judgments about what is good or bad, worthy of attention, "literary" or not aren't entirely socially determined. "Literature" is heavily freighted with the judgments of the past, and present notions of what makes a poem or a novel literary can't escape the influence of the poems and novels that have previously been considered such, even if their influence has resulted in the effort to counteract or negate it. More often, writers attempt to incorporate or creatively transform their influences, so that the work produced by current writers certainly is not free of already established conceptions of the literary as exemplified by the poets and novelists these writers have found important to them. Readers as well are inevitably shaped by the "great books" they have encountered (even if there is disagreement about what those great books are), and their experience of the writing of the present is surely in part conditioned by what these books have prepared them to expect a work of literature to be like.

Skepticism toward the exaltation of Literature, especially when embodied in an unofficial "canon," is expressed by those who feel the concept of literature as we have inherited it is inappropriately exclusive, as well as by those who believe it is still possible to credibly distinguish between works that are more and less significant, but that setting up inflexible criteria for determining what is literature and what is not actually gets in the way of being able to do so fairly. But of course the canon is in fact unofficial, developed mostly as a pedagogical tool in university curricula, and it has been expanded so thoroughly beyond the narrow conception of a canon that might have existed 50 years ago that to believe it still exerts an unduly restrictive influence on the reading choices of most readers is to live in the past at least as stubbornly as any hidebound traditionalist. And far from being unwelcome in most "serious" literary discussions, genre fiction and other forms of popular narrative have never been as influential on writers trying to blur distinctions between the popular and the literary as they are now, nor as accepted by readers prepared to accept that, say, science fiction or crime fiction can be as "serious" in intent as any work of "literary fiction."

Those who object to the preservation of Literature as a measure of the quality of imaginative writing are really objecting to the perceived influence of critical "gatekeepers," self-appointed arbiters of quality and guardians of the canon. After all, no literary work ever elected itself to the canon. This task has instead been taken up by literary scholars and critics, although of course no particular scholar or critic has ever actually been asked to cast a vote, except insofar as English professors choose certain books rather than others in the courses they teach. If for a while–keeping in mind that the academic study of literature as we know it now became widespread less than a hundred years ago, and thus the canon as we speak of it today is also a century or less old–the choices by and large reflected the demographics of the professors (that is, mostly white and male), this certainly had the effect of restricting canonical literature to an overly narrow range of writers and writing, but the gatekeeping done by this old guard of academic scholars was more likely to be of the sort that worked to distinguish between "major" and "minor" writers, the lattter themselves mostly white and male but not as worthy as the former. Certainly it would not have ocurred to these scholars to include what we now call genre fiction, and, sadly, women and minority writers were radically underrepresented because it also would not have occurred to this first generation of literary scholars that such writers existed in large enough numbers to warrant much attention.

It would be difficult to maintain that academic literary scholars now play any gatekeeping role at all. The university curriculum is loaded with courses on genre fiction, popular culture, previously neglected writers of all kinds, as well as courses on canonical texts designed not to foster appreciation but to "interrogate" underlying historical and cultural assumptions making these works anything but "timeless." Academic literary scholars do not currently patrol the gates protecting literary greatness but have taken down the gates, leaving an open field in which virtually no writing or reading practice is disallowed. If Literature remains an oppressive symbol of elitism and exclusion, it is certainly no longer being perpetuated by academe.

This would leave only non-academic literary critics as the guilty parties responsible for using the pretentious standards of Literature in judging writers' work. Presumably a figure such as James Wood, sometimes regarded as a harsh judge indeed, is the sort of critic who won't let Literature go. But while certainly Wood can be dismissive in his reviews of new work, the standards he applies don't come from Literature per se but reflect his own parochial conception of the proper goals of fiction, standards he habitually applies, finding some books that meet them and, unsurprisingly, many that don't. Perhaps all critics develop fundamental principles by which they exercise their judgment, but Wood takes this to a particularly doctrinaire extreme. Still, if you resist Wood's at times imperious pronouncements, you are not resisting an appeal to the haughty demands of Literature but the requirements of James Wood's tendentious notion of "how fiction works."

Capital-l Literature has been permanently reduced to the lower case, and claims that it still lords over lowly readers just can't be sustained. But to insist that critics and reviewers refrain from making any distinctions or rendering negative judgments amounts to declaring that no standards should be applied. Merely because we no longer believe it necessary to permanently enshrine books and writers worth reading into a canon, or judge all literary works by supposedly timeless standards that hold up all new work to comparison with the "existing monuments" of the past doesn't mean critical evaluation itself is obsolete. Critics can surely still provide compelling reasons why a given work is more or less successful. Further, those reasons might be informed by familiarity with a few of those literary monuments, not to mention less imposingly monumental works that were nevertheless good and served for the critic (or the reader) as exemplars of possibility in literary art. Perhaps some great works truly are great, and perhaps some books really are better than others.

It is finally unclear exactly what audience Hershel Parker had in mind in writing Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative. Parker is a distinguished academic scholar, but while a great deal of the book is preoccupied with laying out Parker's side of an academic quarrel, the tone of his exposition of the controversy doesn't suggest he expects the other side to respond–certainly not as part of an ongoing scholarly debate. On the other hand, the nature of this dispute is sufficiently arcane that it probably would not really be of interest to general readers, although Parker's animus against his various detractors is expressed trenchantly (and often) enough that these readers might find his demonstrations of malfeasance occasionally entertaining.

Presumably, admirers of Herman Melville would be potential readers of Melville Biography, but unfortunately most of the discussion in the book requires some prior familiarity not just with Melville's life and work but specifically with Hershel Parker's own previous writing about Melville, most obviously his two-volume biography, published in 1996 and 2002, respectively. At best this book serves as a supplement of sorts to the biography, as we do learn about the assumptions behind Parker's practice as a biographer, and the final section of the book, "The Biographer in the Workshop," does focus on material not included in the biography, and does provide interesting information about such things as the influence of copyright law on Melville's short-lived career as novelist and his relationship with Nathaniel Hawthorne. Still, it would seem that readers who might be interested in such information about Herman Melville would have gone to the biography first before taking up this postscript.

Melville Biography is most interesting as a continuation of a quarrel Parker has been conducting for years–arguably throughout his whole career as a scholar–with academic criticism. The terms of this quarrel roughly correspond to the opposition between "criticism" and "scholarship," with Parker's own work exemplifying the latter and what Parker perceives to be the academic establishment predominantly practicing the former. As the title of this new book suggests, Parker's scholarly work has mostly been biographical (as well as mostly focused on Herman Melville), culminating in the two-volume biography but even before that concentrating on biographical and historical context as the indispensable foundation of serious literary study. Since the death of Jay Leyda, creator of The Melville Log, literally the day by day documentation of Melville's life, Parker has taken over as the proprietor/editor of the Log (and to his credit has expanded it substantially), just one indication of the way Parker has devoted his academic career to retrieving as much concrete information about Herman Melville as possible.

Parker is not interested in accumulating this information just to know more about Melville the historical figure or human personality. He believes that literary criticism cannot proceed at all unless it arises first from reliable knowledge of the writer's circumstances, especially the circumstances related to the work's composition and publication. Parker has frequently expressed his disdain for criticism and interpretation that ignores possible problems with the status of the text itself and blithely comes to conclusions based on corrupted or uncertain texts. His most thorough examination of this issue is his 1984 book, Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons, in which he discusses such textual problems not just in Melville but also Henry James, Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, and, bringing the subject farther into the present, Norman Mailer."It seems that treating the author as an abstracted, olympian power," Parker writes at the end of the first chapter, "frees critics to celebrate nonsensical texts and adventitious meanings in texts where the words, but not all the meanings, are the author's; and treating the text the author created as if it were merely a hypothetical concept, frees them to identify 'the text itself' as the published text or the revised and republished text."

Parker's point is that too much academic criticism, in the form of "close reading," which focuses its attention solely on "the text," carelessly assumes the reliability and authenticity of the text being read. Before venturing an interpretation or asserting the historical or cultural forces the work allegedly makes visible, Parker asks, shouldn't we have some confidence that the text we're citing is the text the author wanted us to read? Even if, as in the case of Crane, the author acquiesced to revisions in order to get the work published, should we accept a palpably inferior text because the author didn't or wasn't able to signal a preference for another version (in Crane's case because of his early death)? Aren't the conclusions a critic might reach about a literary work questionable if the text of that work is itself questionable?

These are entirely relevant questions, ones that academic critics should take seriously, that raise issues transcending the stale debate about the role of the scholar vs. the role of the critic. Surely the critic venturing to claim an authoritative interpretation or close reading of a particular work should have some sense of the text's own authority. Although the most radical implication of Parker's detailed explication of the messy textual histories of these books by Crane, Twain, and Melville is that there might be some works for which a final, definitive text isn't possible, even that finally no such text is really possible for any work of literature, literary criticism that simply ignores the problems Parker identifies is either willfully negligent or shows little respect not just for those scholars who work at providing conscientiously edited texts but also for the process of literary creation, the essential messiness of which is reflected in the realities of publication, even when the latter don't actively mutilate the writer's intended text.

Parker weakens his case, however, by his inclination to blur all disinctions and label anyone who favors interpretation or close analysis a "New Critic." This is made evident directly in the title of Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons in its explicit evocation of the "verbal icon," W.K. Winsatt's notion of the literary text as an aesthetic object made of words, to be approached and appreciated as such by the critic conscious of the work's aesthetic integrity. Parker believes that the original New Crtics' dogmatic rejection of "extrinsic evidence," evidence not directly to be found in the verbal disposition of the text at hand, was so influential that their "avoidance of 'textual bibliography' in all its aspects, including study of compositional evidence, has prevailed during all later fashions in criticism." Indeed, "even the deconstructionists in practice treated any text as a New Critical given, however thoroughly they would then proceed to deconstruct it," and the New Historicists, who would seem to have retrieved "extrinsic evidence" from opprobrium, unfortunately "proceeded to write history and literary history as if research had all been done before, once and for all, prior to, say around 1940." (The last quote from Melville Biography.) These postmodern historicists "were no such fools as to hope to tell the truth: there was no such thing as truth."

     Parker is dedicated to the idea that there is truth to be applied to works of literature, and finally the influence of New Criticism has been to emphasize coherence of interpretation over truth, the integrity of close reading over scholarship that uncovers the truth. But while there is some plausibility to the notion that deconstruction (at least as practiced by Derrida) has affinities with New Critical close reading, to the extent that New Criticism was an attempt to place the study of literature at the center of the English curriculum, in effect to place literature itself at the center of this curriculum, deconstruction was less interested in close reading as a strategy for appreciating literature as a means for raising questions about the nature of human communication, ultimately about the nature of human thought. Although Derrida's reading strategies could certainly be used to examine a literary text in a way that would be compatible with New Criticism–emphasizing uncertainty, ambiguity, "gaps," etc,–the rise of deconstruction (of what is called "critical theory" more generally) most immediately signalled a move away from "appreciation" of literature to its more detached "interrogation." Both critical theory and new historicism, however much they avoided "textual bibliography," also unfortunately tended to avoid literature as well. In their shared goals of enhancing appreciation of literature as the actual subject of the discipline of literary study, Hershel Parker the scholar surely has much more in common with New Critics than with critical theorists, new historicists, and those academic critics now engaged in cultural studies, all of whom have done much more than the New Critics ever did to make Parker's kind of textual and biographical scholarship passe.

Even if you accept that there is a divide between "criticism" and "scholarship" of the kind Parker laments, and even if you accept that New Criticism may have helped to orient literary study away from biographical criticism, text editing, and historical investigation (all of which nevertheless remained visible scholarly approaches even during the heyday of New Criticism), it is a not a necessary conclusion that New Critical formalism was inherently hostile to traditional scholarship. For one thing, conscientious proponents of close reading would be foolish to dismiss attempts to establish reliable texts or to get historical information right for the very reason that Parker's own discussions in Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons provides: A reading of a flawed text is ultimately a flawed reading. For an approach that implicitly holds every word in a literary text to be potentially significant, perhaps crucial, to disdain a concern that all the words be justifiably in place would undermine the whole project. Moreover, New Criticism's skepticism about non-textual "evidence" came from a resistance to "readings" that, in drawing on history, biography, or politics, diverted attention from the experience of reading the work to these other subjects, not from a lack of respect for the accomplishments of literary scholarship.

In Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative, Parker's ire is primarily directed at such current academic critics as Andrew Delbanco and Richard Brodhead (currently President of Duke University), both of whom could be called "New Critics" only in the expanded, indeterminate definition Parker has given it in order to identify the source of these critics' disparagement of his work, especially the biography of Melville. I myself find Parker's defense of his biography against the criticisms made by Delbanco and Brodhead persuasive, but also don't understand why these criticisms can't simply be addressed in their own terms rather than generalizing them into a perpetual struggle between what in Parker's analysis are ancient enemies. Not only is this likely to seem to most potential readers of the book a rather musty characterization of the issues, belonging to an era now long superseded by one in which both criticism and scholarship have been radically transformed, but the terms of the debate seem to have become so personal for Hershel Parker that the book can at times be uncomfortable to read as well. It is clear enough that Parker feels his biography was unfairly treated (and indeed perhaps it was), but a grievance sustained over the length of a 500-page book can finally wear a little thin.

Flawed Texts and Verbal icons is an illuminating and important book, well worth reading even by those who might consider Parker's scholarly approach hopelessly old-fashioned, who might instead come to recognize that inaccurate or corrupted texts are just as threatening to "extrensic" historical and cultural generalizations using literary works as critical specimens as to "intrinsic" explication. As long as literary texts remain the ostensible focus of literary study (which of course is even now not always the case), their reliabilty will always be a relevant issue–not to mention its relevance simply to readers who want to feel confident the books they are reading adequately represent what their authors intended them to read. Melville Biography, unfortunately, is of much less interest, although perhaps it could persuade a few to give Parker's biography a try, or to pursue the underlying points of contention more directly through Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons instead.

In a review of the novel in Review 31, Helen McClory makes a curious criticism of Helen DeWitt's 2011 novel, Lightning Rods:

What it lacks is interiority. The narration, because it is so slick and over-worked, has the feel of a voice-over; it's all surface, even when we are ostensibly presented with access to the minds of the characters. This creates a sensation of hollowness. . .

The total misperception of DeWitt's purpose in Lightning Rods is extraordinary. As almost all other reviewers of this novel observed, it is most certainly a novel of "interiority," although it is a special kind of interiority that deliberately uses the contents of consciousness–more importantly, the forms of expression those contents assume–to create a pervasively "surface" effect. If it seems "slick and overworked," that's because the modes of thinking the novel travesties are themselves so formulaic and riven with cliche. "A sensation of hollowness" is precisely the effect Lightning Rods is designed to create.

The plot of Lightning Rods is no doubt by now well-known, as the novel received numerous reviews that prominently emphasized its outrageous premise. A failed vacuum cleaner salesman, Joe, is inspired by his own sexual fantasies to begin marketing a new service designed to help alleviate sexual harassment in the workplace: a contraption installed in an office bathroom that allows testosterone-addled men to have anonymous sex with women (the lightning rods) whose bottom halves are exposed rearward and then withdrawn back through the bathroom wall. The service proves to be quite successful, for the companies whose workplaces become less litigious, for the men whose needs are fulfilled and thus become more efficient and cooperative workers, and for the women. who are handsomely rewarded financially and in some cases use the job to work themselves up the "corporate ladder." (One of the lightning rods eventually becomes a Supreme Court lawyer.)

Joe's diligence and sincerity are reflected in the manner of the book's narration, nominally in the form of "free indirect" discourse, the stylistic/narrative mode developed precisely to plumb a character's "interiority." But while the language with which the story is told surely does capture the way Joe both perceives the world and explains it to himself, it is indeed shallow and hackneyed, permeated by the external languages of self-help and commerce:

Now if you're selling encyclopedias it's obvious you're selling people the idea that they can be what they want to be. But even if you're selling vacuum cleaners you're selling people the way they could be–they could be people who will clean their stairs and the furniture and curtains using appropriate attachments, instead of borrowing a vacuum cleaner for Thanksgiving and Christmas from their next-door neighbors. You're selling the chance to fix something that's wrong. What you're selling, basically, is the idea that there's nothing wrong with the customer; maybe they don't know as much as they should, or maybe they happen to live in a dirty house, but that's because they don't have the one thing lacking to put it right.

The reader could turn to practically any page in Lightning Rods and find a passage like this. Clearly DeWitt wants not just to emphasize Joe's subjectivity, but to suggest that this very subjectivity has been thoroughly determined by the all-pervasive discourses, and the underlying assumptions, of American-style capitalism and its accompanying modes of therapeutic encouragement. No matter how "deep" we plumb into Joe's "interiority," we're only going to find more such platitudinous language and bromidic concepts, since in effect they have replaced any genuine interiority, substituted for any genuine thinking, beyond the need to apply the concepts most effectively. As Edmond Caldwell observes in his review of the novel, "It is less like Joe 'uses' this language. . .and more like this language thinks him"–although it might be even more accurate to say there is no thinking at all going on, only the pre-formulated thinking represented by the recycling of familiar expressions.

Caldwell also maintains that the novel is a satire of its own ostensible genre, the novel of "psychological realism," which "stands revealed as a patchwork of readymade materials–cliches and slogans, the hoariest sententia and newly-minted banalities." If all such novels are "no less a howling absurdity than Lightning Rods, the difference is that one of them knows itself as such." While I would not deny the accuracy of this reading, I don't think the self-satirical impulse fully accounts for the effects DeWitt manages to achieve in nevertheless exploiting the assumptions of psychological realism. She employs its "cliches and slogans" in a way that, at the same they are revealed to be such, transcends the "banalities" of this mode of narration to tell a story that is far from banal, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of John Barth's notion of a "literature of exhaustion" that takes the very "used-upness" of a literary practice and creates something new. As much as it shows psychological realism to be "a patchwork of readymade materials," the novel also shows that human consciousness itself (at least of the "ordinary" variety) might be a hodgepodge of such materials. There's no going "deep," only going sideways into more culturally determined fragments of predigested language.

"Surface" and "interiority" are interchangeable, versions of each other. The characters' motives are not hidden (to themselves or to us) but quite transparent, although those motives are encapsulated in the shallowest, most insipid kind of interior discourse. The most powerful human motive, sex, is, of course, thoroughly externalized, subjected to the same trivialization and commodification by which American culture reduces all human activity to commerce. (It isn't prostitution if it makes good business sense.) Much of the humor in Lightning Rods comes from the way in which the characters readily adapt to circumstances that might otherwise provoke feelings of shame and degradation, how easily the sexual drive comes to be regarded as something that merely requires the right kind of management.

What makes this novel more than simply satirical (whether of the American commercial imperative or the novel of psychological realism) is that the ostensible target, our protagonist Joe, in whose "interiority" we have been placed and whose idea it is to channel the sexual drive in his commercialized service, is finally not a character deserving only of our laughter. Above all, Joe is utterly sincere in his belief that his service will have beneficial effects, that in offering it he is doing good. He shows concern for his employees, and as a sideline to the main business of providing lightning rods, he also devises an adjustable toilet to make public restrooms easier on short and/or obese people. His sincerity and good intentions make it difficult to regard Joe as a purely risible figure; he winds up being a rather sympathetic character who at worst has succumbed to the irresistible influence of cultural forces outside his control.

Readers of DeWitt's first novel, The Last Samurai, might at first find Lightning Rods a radically different kind of work, almost to the point it doesn't seem by the same writer. Samurai is a sprawling novel that at times courts formlessness, while Lightning Rods is a compact, sharply focused work exhibiting a unified narrative perspective that contrasts with the bifurcated perspective of The Last Samurai. Ultimately The Last Samurai could be called a novel about a search for identity, while the characters in Lightning Rods seem quite confident in their identities, even if those identities are ultimately culturally constructed. To a degree, however, both books are about the use and abuse of language.The Last Samurai highlights the possibilities of language in its story of the budding genius Ludo and his facility in many languages and ability to relate them to each other, something that DeWitt also does in the novel as a whole. Lightning Rods illustrates our more common relationship with language, whereby we allow our thinking to be determined by language in its most ossified, restrictive forms. If The Last Samurai implies the yet untapped potential of language when viewed cross-culturally, Lightning Rods reveals how any language can become so burdened with the conceptual debris scattered by one's culture as to become hazardous to all thought.

I've rarely read an essay whose title so inaccurately signals its content than Annie Murphy Paul's "Reading Literature Makes Us Smarter and Nicer," posted at Time.com. It is ostensibly a response to Gregory Currie's post on the New York Times's Opinionator blog, "Does Great Literature Make Us Better?," but in fact after quoting Currie's contention there is little evidence "that people are morally or socially better for reading Tolstoy," Paul does not discuss "literature" at all but instead moves on to make claims about the nature of reading that can't withstand scrutiny and do nothing to show that reading literary works makes us "smarter and nicer."

The bulk of her argument is a brief on behalf of "deep reading," which she then uses to attack the kind of reading she thinks the internet encourages. According to Paul

Recent research in cognitive science, psychology and neuroscience has demonstrated that deep reading — slow, immersive, rich in sensory detail and emotional and moral complexity — is a distinctive experience, different in kind from the mere decoding of words. Although deep reading does not, strictly speaking, require a conventional book, the built-in limits of the printed page are uniquely conducive to the deep reading experience. A book’s lack of hyperlinks, for example, frees the reader from making decisions — Should I click on this link or not? — allowing her to remain fully immersed in the narrative.

This sort of affirmation of what is asserted to be "deep reading" has become quite common among those who think the internet has endangered it, but on a fundamental level, Paul's articulation of the claim is incoherent. The biggest problem is in the conception of "reading" (presumably fiction) to begin with. It's certainly unclear why "deep" must be equated with "slow," but even more perplexing is the notion that reading might be "rich in sensory detail" and involves "emotional and moral complexity." The only "sensory detail" that could possibly accompany the act of reading is the visual detail of words on a page encountered by the eye. Any other manifestation of sensory detail occurs in the reader's mind as he/she projects the images the writer attempts to simulate through words–but of course these images are not literally present for the reader to perceive. Similarly, "emotional and moral complexity" is not something we read, but instead create ourselves upon reflection about what we have read–probably considerably after the fact.

This alleged "deep" experience of detail and complexity Paul sums up in her use of the word "immersion," which "is supported by the way the brain handles language rich in detail, allusion and metaphor: by creating a mental representation that draws on the same brain regions that would be active if the scene were unfolding in real life." At least Paul here acknowledges that the activities of reading are psychological/neurological activities produced by the mind itself, but she also reveals that her underlying assumption about "literature" is that it essentially consists of an image-based narrative that can be followed as if "the scene were unfolding in real life." In other words, what "immersion" in a literary work amounts to is that the brain converts the text into a "mental representation" that is a lot like a movie.

Thus we are "immersed" in a book in the same way we allow our attention to be captured by the most compelling movies. Indeed, Paul describes this almost involuntary immersion as akin to "a hypnotic trance." Paul clearly believes this is a beneficial state in which to find oneself as a reader, but it's not at all clear why this would be the case. Is it really a good thing that this sort of "deep" reading "frees the reader from making decisions"? Shouldn't serious reading be an active experience that broadens our awareness rather than the passive experience that constricts it Annie Murphy Paul is offering us? Isn't reading really something very different from watching a movie, calling on entirely other human capacities?

Ultimately Paul's essay devolves into the same old simplistic celebration of print over internet, even though that has nothing at all to do with the issue Currie raises in questioning the putative moral effects of works of literature.Online reading, with its pesky decisions and constant distractions, threatens to undermine our ability to read deeply, which is really only encouraged by print, etc., etc. Curiously, after deploring the tendency of online reading to present obstacles to uninterrupted reading, Paul claims that "slow, unhurried" reading has the virtue of allowing readers time "to enrich their reading with reflection, analysis, and their own memories and opinions." What is the deflection of attention to "reflection" and the intrusion of "memories and opinions" if not distractions, wanderings away from the work at hand? Here it seems to me that Paul simply casts deep reading as a more elevated form of preoccupation with self.

Unfortunately, the whole debate on the nature of reading and on the effects of reading "literature" in particular is usually predicated on a view of literature that is reductive and misleading. Paul and Currie alike rely on a concept of literature that first of all restricts it to fiction (usually novels). Seldom included in the discussion is the experience of reading poetry, which in most cases surely can't be equated with the act of following a narrative as if it were a movie running in our heads. Its moral effects can't be based on our response to characters and their dilemmas or, as suggested by some studies of readers' responses to fiction, through our identification with their "mind." Further, the fiction considered in these discussions is usually the most conventional, story-centered and realistic sort (except when it is most obviously "mind"-centered, as in Virginia Woolf). Are we "immersed" in, say, Finnegans Wake or The Unnameable in the same way Paul claims we are in those narratives featuring "scenes" that seem to be "unfolding in real life"?

Reading works like these would have to involve engaging "deeply" with the irreducible medium of literature, language itself. Since such works in their own deep immersion in language and its aesthetic possibilities have an even greater claim to be considered "literature" than the kind of routine narrative fiction the debate about the importance of reading usually presumes, perhaps those involved in this debate ought to devote some attention to them instead.

Daniel Mendelsohn contends that to be a critic requires "expertise, authority, and taste." He leaves out the most important attribute a critic should have: the ability to pay attention. In fact, without this one, the others Mendelsohn mentions are superfluous

Any defensible judgment about a work of literature must arise from observable features on which the judgment is based and to which the critic can return. This is where the distinction between having an "opinion" about a text and being able to support that opinion is real. An opinion is only a provisional conclusion until it can be allied with and clarified by specific illustration from the work, until the critic can point to those particulars of the work that prompted the opinion. An unsupported opinion may or may not contain implicit but unstated illustration of this kind, but as long as it's unstated, it is not itself "criticism." Not everyone wants to be a critic, of course, but a book review, for example, can't really be taken seriously as criticism unless some text-based "evidence" is provided.

Providing such evidence requires that the critic pay attention. Close attention. This would involve, of course, noting, in fiction, such conventional elements as narrative structure (especially variations in narrative structure), character development (especially the writer's strategies for influencing our attitude toward characters), point of view, etc., but since fiction as a genre of literature is at its core the creation of illusions of such things as "character," "story," or "setting" through skillful manipulation of language, a critic needs ultimately to be able to focus on the writer's invocation of language, on the text as an artificial arrangement of words. Attempting to explicate a work of fiction by leaping first of all to plot or character or any other imposed device rather than considering the way such devices are conditioned by and embedded in language ignores the very medium through which literature exists, as if a work of fiction was really just like a movie aside from those pesky words. (Although film criticism certainly requires attention to the use of medium as well, in this case the manipulation of visual imagery.)

Being attentive to language does not mean picking out isolated passages of "fine writing" and making a fuss over them. More often not, such purported fine writing is just the decorative cover for a work that otherwise does aspire to be a movie. Ultimately language is everything in a work of literature, and a critic needs to account for the way a writer marshals the resources of language to create all of the effects in that work. If, for example, "setting" seems to play an especially important role in a novel or story, a critic should be expected to notice the way the writer's prose works to make setting (again an illusion created with words) seem so prominent. To a significant extent, this means the critic needs to describe the work at hand as carefully as possible, or at least the work as experienced by the critic (and potentially the reader) paying close attention. Judgment, which critics such as Mendelsohn want to assign such an essential part in literary criticism, can only be justified, and ultimately taken seriously, if it is preceded by this kind of scrupulous description.

Absent the effort to give close attention to the tangible features of the literary work, to explain what the experience of reading that work is like, what Mendelsohn calls "expertise" is largely beside the point. If Mendelsohn means by using this term to suggest that someone possessing it is an "expert" reader in that he/she does indeed know how to pay close attention, then of course I agree with him, although it is not necessary to be "expert" in some credentialed way in order to exercise this expertise. If, as I suspect, Mendelsohn means that a an authentic critic is one who can cite all the myriad books he/she has read, or has read all the right ones, or who possesses the appropriate academic pedigree, then this sort of expertise by itself is mostly meaningless. An amateur critic can read just as sensitively as a "professional" critic.

Indeed, the "authority" a critic can bring to the consideration of literary works can only come from the authority that the sensitivity and insight of any particular reading brings with it (although of course some critics can demonstrate over time a consistency of insight that gives that critic a kind of default authority). Unless the critic's work earns its authority, the sort of authority that comes from the supposed prestige of the publication in which that work appears or from some other external affiliation is just specious. Whenever someone like Mendelsohn (or Sir Peter Stothard, who recently opined about the "harm" blogging is doing to literature,) complain about the loss of "authority" being suffered by literary criticism (or book reviewing), it always seems to me they're basically lamenting the loss of this latter, artificial, and self-assumed authority.

"Taste," of course, is the most subjective of the qualities Mendelsohn prizes in a critic, and the purported possession of it by some (critics) and its absence in others (too many readers) has long been used as justification for the implicit deference we are to pay to the "best" critics. At some level it is undeniably good for a critic to be able to discern the artful from the meretricious, but the notion of taste is also used, frequently I think, as the excuse for bringing attention to some books and writers and ignoring others, thus giving the former the tacitly official approval of the guardians of literary culture. When critics are presuming to act as such guardians, their "judgment" especially needs to be examined with skepticism, as this act of sorting (abetted by editors) can actually do harm to literary culture by excluding adventurous writers and elevating those more acceptable to the cultural mainstream. "Taste" is again something that can be validated only by the strength of the critic's descriptions and analysis. It shouldn't be assumed.

I do not say that Daniel Mendelsohn in particular is guilty of this offense or that he abuses the critic's privileges in the other ways I have described. I find most of his reviews to be perfectly sound, although I don't always agree with him. And I do agree with him when he says that the "serious critic ultimately loves his subject more than he loves his reader." The literary critic's primary allegiance should be to literature, to its continuation and continued vitality. If his/her "expertise" consists of ideas about how to effect this, if "authority" is something that helps to ensure it, if "taste" means being able to recognize when a writer or work is likely to contribute to the effort, then indeed the critic needs all of these qualities.

Were Mary McCarthy to walk among us again, she would surely be astounded to discover her work being championed in The Weekly Standard. As the author of this appreciation, Jonathan Leaf, acknowledges, McCarthy was a "lifelong leftist," and Leaf goes on to note her "rampant promiscuity" edging into "nymphomania," hardly qualities that would commend themselves to the conservative audience of this magazine. Perhaps since McCarthy was an anti-Stalinist leftist, the neocons at The Weekly Standard think she might ultimately have become one of them (her political evolution in the 1930s out of Communism through Trotskyism mirrors that of Irving Kristol), but her radical opposition to the Vietnam War does not suggest she would have approved of the Iraq invasion.

Indeed, Leaf claims it is McCarthy's writing, namely her fiction, that should recommend her to us. And here we can perhaps get some sense of why a right-wing magazine would publish as essay celebrating the left-wing McCarthy. Leaf doesn't merely think McCarthy has been unjustly overlooked, but makes some pretty strong claims on her behalf: her first book, The Company She Keeps, is superior to Lolita ("more substantial stuff"); The Group is "Portnoy’s Complaint told from a woman’s point of view. . .written in a far superior style"; in fact, "no American since Scott Fitzgerald has written so felicitously" as McCarthy.

It's hard to take issue with Leaf's analysis on these points, since there is no analysis, not even quotation that would exemplify the claimed felicity of her style. These are sentiments that probably are at least as much expressions of Leaf's disdain for Nabokov and Roth than of esteem for McCarthy, but in either case we really get no support for the literary judgment the author has reached. However, we do get some indication of why Leaf wants to extol McCarthy's work. Her fiction, we are told, presents a "view of woman [that] is not one in which she is an innocent victim or strong sister but, rather, crafty and scheming." Furthermore, McCarthy "depicts motherhood as natural, central, and rewarding," and these depictions of women, along with her "effective demolition of Simone de Beauvoir" in an essay, presumably make McCarthy useful in the effort to fight back feminism.

In addition, McCarthy's work helps us to see that "fiction should be judged principally in terms of its merit as storytelling, and read primarily to find out what happens to the hero or heroine." I have to believe that this is the most important reason why it is now acceptable in The Weekly Standard to hold up a writer like Mary McCarthy as an important and neglected figure in American literature. Postmodernists (and apparently even late modernists such as Nabokov and Roth) are regarded by contemporary conservatives with the same disdain they hold for liberals, and for reasons that have never been entirely clear to me. (It doesn't hurt, of course, that McCarthy also presents a satirical portrayal of "left-wing English professors" in one of her novels, although it's less apparent to me why "the preoccupation among literary scholars with symbolism," which McCarthy also satirizes, should be considered an affront to right-thinking readers.) Much of the resistance to both modernism and postmodernism came from leftist critics, who upheld social realism as the literary strategy most suitable to advancing their political goals and derided modernist/postmodernist experiment as unserious and "game-playing." Right-wing critics have now adopted the literary preferences of their left-wing antagonists, although it seems doubtful they expect realism and traditional storytelling to reinforce their political ideals (a mistaken assumption by radical critics in the first place.)

Or do they? Do they assume that fiction encouraging a preoccupation with "what happens to the hero or heroine" and using familiar narrative means will help keep the mass of readers quiescent? Is the "conservative" vision of the goal of literature now one that ratifies any strategy or theme that could even vaguely be called "traditional"? This latter possibility seems to me the most plausible explanation of the conservative embrace of a writer like Mary McCarthy, who at one time would have been considered dangerous to the social order, and I would not deny the validity of such a move. Through a strategy of what Richard Rorty called "redescription," a writer whose own ambitions for her work would not at all have coincided with the purposes of those now appropriating that work is made to seem sympathetic to these purposes. There's nothing dishonest about such redescription, but I do wonder if conservatives such as Leaf could be entirely comfortable with the relativism on which it is ultimately based.

One could conclude that if the "traditional" fiction of Mary McCarthy can be appropriated to the conservative agenda while her actual beliefs are ignored or discounted, the greater threat to that agenda must be not liberalism but unconventional, adventurous literature. Its challenge to passive reading must seem a greater danger than the mistaken political views of a left-wing nymphomaniac.

Daniel Davis Wood (his weblog is Infinite Patience) recently published a provocative article in Other Modernities in which he argues that American readers have shown impatience with "post-9/11 fiction" that attempts to come to terms with the event and its aftermath through conventional social/psychological realism and have expressed this impatience through increased interest in such works by British writers as Tom McCarthy's Remainder, Lays Iyers's Spurious, and Lee Rourke's The Canal.

In short, I think, we are witnessing the rebirth of a literary tradition originally born from a crisis that precedes 9/11 but that has nevertheless resulted in the literary internalization of crisis in general, thereby attracting the attention of American readers with a hunger for a more credible response to crisis than the response on offer in the polite realism of the American literary mainstream.

The tradition to which Wood believes these novels belong is that of the nouveau roman, which, in Wood's account "rejects verisimilitude in favor of formal innovation, which engages rather than evades its own inadequacies as a means of representing actuality, and which thus holds a fascination with its own poetics over and above any concern with ‘the real world.’" This is a perfectly cogent description of the goals of the nouveau roman as enunciated in particular by Alain Robbe-Grillet, although I'm not so sure Robbe-Grillet was as committed to the notion of fiction's "inadequacies as a means of representing actuality" as Wood suggests. In the essay "From Realism to Reality," Robbe-Grillet wrote that "the discovery of reality will continue only if we abandon outworn forms." Further, "unless we suppose that the world is henceforth entirely discovered (and, in that case, the wisest thing would be to stop writing altogether), we can only attempt to go farther." Robbe-Grillet believed that the narrative forms associated with realism were exhausted, but that new and experimental forms might take us even closer to reality.

Wood's contention that McCarthy, Iyers, and Rourke be judged as nouveau nouveaux romanciers is also well-taken. Certainly their work has more in common with continental modernism as extended through the nouveau roman than with British social realism, and both McCarthy and Iyers have explicitly and often expressed their allegiance to continental modernism as exemplified by such writers as Blanchot and Bernhard. But ulitmately Wood seems to leave too little room for the work of these writers to stand firmly enough on its "fascination with its own poetics." A novel like Remainder or Spurious still "implicitly addresses 9/11 via its literary form" rather than taking the changed conditions post 9/11 directly as subject, but whether a work of fiction is said to "respond" directly to such conditions or to do so indirectly by implicitly acknowledging its inability to respond directly seems to me to make little difference. "Realism" and its supposed alternative in formal experiment are cast as performing a pas-de-deux to the same musical accompaniment, with the familiar motif that it is the novelist's job precisely to "respond" to extant cultural circumstances. In each case, fiction is reduced to an ancillary form of journalism, its task to register important cultural shifts.

Why can't writers embrace "formal innovation" as an end in itself, without in effect justifying it by framing it as a "response" to cultural changes? Why can't readers embrace Remainder, Spurious, or The Canal as indeed part of a "widespread dissatisfaction with the dominance of post-9/11 fiction by literary realism" without also demanding there still be a recognizable category of "post-9/11 fiction"? Is all fiction inevitably to be assigned to this category simply because it appeared after September 11, 2001? Hasn't the folly of fixating on this event as somehow representing a monumental displacement of "actuality," an unprecedented event in the history of human irrationality and barbarism, been made manifestly clear in the insane militarism and hysterical intolerance that have ensued in its wake? It has certainly done its share of damage to serious writing and honest criticism. In its attempt to dispel the "crisis of confidence" 9/11 produced in some discussions of American fiction, Wood's essay is surely honest criticism, but I don't think it sufficiently lets go of "9/11" as the signal event in recent literary history.

Wood is right, however, to point out that it has taken these novels by British writers in an identifiably European tradition to reveal "dissatisfaction" among American readers and critics with mainstream American fiction. The conclusion to be reached from his analysis would be either that there are no American writers offering the same kind of alternative, or that at least such efforts have not been made visible enough. Although I do believe that too much of what is called "innovative" fiction in the United States has been traveling down the dead-end road of a torpid surrealism (which is most assuredly engaged in its own pas-de-deux with realism), I also think there are writers who deserve more attention for the way they do provide relief from the post 9/11 syndrome. I will take it as a challenge to identify and discuss some of those writers, both on this blog and in reviews I may publish elsewhere.