Cynthia Ozick (Foreign Bodies) has been a brilliant and acclaimed central figure in U.S. literature for almost half a century. She begins Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, & Other Literary Essays with a manifesto on the importance of literary criticism for novelists and the general culture. Critics, she emphasizes, are key. Not so much reviewers--especially not Amazon reviewers, who "expose their insipidities to a mass audience" in a "fetid sea, where both praise and blame are leveled by tsunamis of incapacity." But a community of erudite, idiosyncratic, passionate critics can illuminate the links among books, set them in cultural and historical context, and goad the literary world toward excellence.
"A critic is nothing without an authoritative posture, or standard, or even prejudice, against which an opposing outlook or proposition can be tested." Ozick has many of her own, and forges ahead with them in this collection of forceful, witty, thoroughly argued essays. In "Novel or Nothing," she tells of the renowned critic Lionel Trilling's frustrated ambition to become a great novelist. Her review of the collected letters of Saul Bellow becomes a tribute to his career and the strength of his legacy.
Ozick has her tics; "contrapuntal" is one of them, and most readers are likely to find at least one or two words she uses obscure. She would probably tell you to look them up. No one is likely to agree with everything she has to say about American literature, nor should they: these essays challenge readers to form their own well-considered ideas. --Sara Catterall