This essay collection reminded me of Ecclesiastes more than anything else; it rages against Eccleiastes's unassailable truth: ashes to ashes; dust to dust.

In the last decade, the last wave of memoirs to ever be published by WWII veterans has been published; written by old men who, aware they are approaching the end of their lives, are powerfully motivated to preserve their witness to history in words. In a similar way, in this collection, Ozick is witnessing her life as a 20th century literary intellectual.

Ozick isn't writing literary criticism here so much as she is mourning the passing of an era. I'm very moved by what she writes here, but my feeling has little to do with its intellectual content or its logic, and everything to do with the sadness in it.

To declare, as Ozick does here, that Saul Bellow is the only writer who has survived from her era is sad; it's sad to realize so many great writers and critics, writers central to 20th century letters, are little read today; it's all the more sad to realize as I read this essay that no one reads Saul Bellow much any longer, either.

I come away with the fragile hope that, even as the literary culture and the literature we once experienced as new and vivid becomes old and unread, Ozick's essays will point the way for some literary critic of the future to discover the way back. ( )

Review is available at The New York Journal of Books:

http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/critics-monsters ( )

This woman knows how to write about literature. Her piece on Kafka is brilliant as are the many other smaller gems sprinkled throughout the book. She inspires the reader to seek out new authors as I did reading through Edmund Wilson's The Dead Sea Scrolls piece.

Her fiction is as good as her critical writing. I recommend The Messiah of Stockholm. ( )

I had a mixed response to Cynthia Ozick's latest collection of essays, Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays. One of the things I like best about Ozick as a critic is that she pulls no punches; as she says in "The Boys in the Alley, the Disappearing Readers, and the Novel's Ghostly Twin," "[a] critic is, at bottom, a judge, and judgment ought not to be tentative[.]" Yet it is this selfsame certainty which I found irritating in "The Boys in the Alley," perhaps because her judgment here is directed at me, the reader, as much as (if not more than) the literary critics who are her putative subject; that this essay is both the longest and one of the first in the book colored my perception of the book as a whole and diminished, to some extent, my enjoyment of the more traditional literary criticism found in the sections on "Fanatics" and "Monsters."

What bothered me so much about "The Boys in the Alley" (who, by the way, are Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus) was Ozick's condescension toward the typical Goodreads reader, whose reviews she describes as contributing merely to "the skin of a genuine literary culture." She goes on in this vein:

"Most customer reviewers, though clearly tough customers when it comes to awarding stars, are not tough enough - or well-read enough - for tragic realism or psychological complexity."

Ouch. To the extent Ozick and her publisher intend for her book to sell to the non-literati, they exhibit an amazing amount of chutzpah in denigrating the very people who are most likely to buy it.

Ozick is far from the first (or last, for that matter) person to raise this question: How knowledgeable and well-read must I be for my opinion of a particular work or author to "count," to be worthy of both public expression and public consideration? Ozick surely realizes that we are not all so fortunate as to be full-time readers; most of us are lucky to fit a couple of hours of reading around work and family responsibilities. She also acknowledges that "[t]he literary judgments even of novelists of consequence can be capricious," citing Virginia Woolf's dismissal of James Joyce and V.S. Naipaul's disdain for Henry James. If even such literary heavyweights as these can "get it wrong," why should Ozick so vociferously denounce most of us as "naive and unqualified [not to mention "insipid"] readers who look for easy prose and uplifting endings"?

Don't get me wrong; I am no literary relativist. I agree with Ozick that "a critic is nothing without an authoritative posture, or standard." I believe that not all books are created equal; that we can, and should, recognize some books (the few) as "better than" others (the many); and that we need those, like Lionel Trilling, Harold Bloom, Michael Dirda, and Ozick herself, who can offer what most of us cannot: "horizonless freedoms, multiple histories, multiple libraries, multiple metaphysics and intuitions." What I do suggest, however, is that readers are inherently suspicious of critics perceived to be elitist and that Ozick should remember that just because the current "climate of opinion" doesn't look like Trilling's doesn't necessarily mean that we have no "living literary consciousness" at all.

Getting off my soapbox now, the more conventional critical essays comprising the remainder of the book are well worth reading, with Ozick providing some astute aphorisms, including my personal favorite:

"Whoever utters 'Kafkaesque' has neither fathomed nor intuited nor felt the impress of Kafka's devisings."

I suggest that readers may appreciate this collection more if they save "The Boys in the Alley" for last.

I received a free copy of Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. ( )