In American Audacity: In Defense of Literary Daring, William Giraldi shares his skepticism of multiculturalism, MFA programs and "the ceaseless yawp of social media." But he considers the biggest threat to the literary arts to be something not exclusive to the modern age: dullness.
There's never a dull moment in American Audacity--and that's just the sort of cliché that Giraldi calls out in the book reviews that speckle his pitilessly probing collection. These 38 pieces, all but one of which hail from periodicals of one type (Newsweek) or another (Kenyon Review), are grouped into three sections: topical essays (on the Boston Marathon bombing, Fifty Shades of Grey), tributes to great minds (Cynthia Ozick, Harold Bloom) and critical assessments (Harper Lee, Moby-Dick). Talk about quotes for every occasion: Giraldi pulls out the pertinent words of literary lions like pocket change.
The author of a memoir and novels (including Hold the Dark), Giraldi isn't stingy with praise, but criticism seems to come easier to him, whether he's moved by reason (Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" "lives several zip codes over from his best work") or irritation ("Nicholas Sparks is so chronically saccharine you can feel yourself getting diabetes as you read"). While reading American Audacity, in which Giraldi laments "the kindergartening of American letters," expect to encounter multiple uses of words like "Eliotic" and "postlapsarian," and anticipate taking a few trips to the dictionary. News of this might draw the rare dull word out of Giraldi: "Good." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer