Customer Reviews

The Critics Bear it Away: American Fiction and the Academy

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Never mind that this book was written in the 90s. Crews was there at the beginning of nonsensical Lit Crit Theory and saw through it. In his indispensable satires The Pooh Perplex and Postmodern Pooh, Crews proves that starting with a theory and then trying to match the facts to it doesn't work in literature any better than in does in science or technology. But what happens when rational and empirical principles are applied to today's most conspicuous writing? The Critics Bear It Away -- the title borrows from Flannery O'Connor -- shows how Crews clear-headed approach to careful consideration of what's actually in the written record can find something useful to readers even of writers that lie hidden behind smoke screens of contradictory and misleading critical verbiage. Readers wanting to find a helpful place from which to critique today's better writing and what would like to be mistaken for it can start here.

Prof. Crews writes very confidently, at times arrogantly, about the subjects presented in this book. He makes no effort to understand fiction beyond a standard, very opinionated (assumes you accept him as an expert on fiction--balderdash), left-wing (may I say N.Y. lit crowd groupie or member),very inconsistent in quality analysis of lit. His chapter on Flannery O's Connor should be read carefully as a classic example of making no effort to understand the context of her writing or understand her stories and novels apart from his own limited worldview; is afraid to admit he doesn't really understand what he is writing about.

I though he was very condescending and unilluminating (confusing when writing about O'Connor) in the three essays I read. The Faulkner chapter was okay if a Berkley undergrad had written it. He doesn't really get the South nor does he care to enlighten himself. His chapter on O'Connor is confusing and shows he doesn't really understand at a literal level her writing. His last sentence damns her with faint praise. Her religion and her Southern background are beyond him (see above). Only a very superficial reading of her stories and Wise Blood yields his cliched (in that many liberals write this way about O'Connor) conclusion that she writes in a very narrow way about a very small world.

or Crews her chief and dispositive failure is to write more or less the same story over and over. He is ironically wrong in his judgment of her and of his judgment of his own critical powers. Her writing is original and powerful and subtle and not easy to whiz through. I think his main problem is that he doesn't like all the praise she receives. He doesn't understand her stories (see his last sentence and the cop-out conclusion about either explaining her electric writing or explaining it away--binary confusion for reader and Crews). In fact his satirical critical writing could easily include his chapter on O'Connor as an example of lit crit. gone amok. See the Pooh books.

I agree with Crews about Freud, but there is a parallel to his chapter on O'connor and his writing on Freud--lack of deep understanding of what Freud and O'Connor are doing. He dances on the surface. By the way, this was originally published in The New York Review of Books, a biased, overrated journal of opinion, if there ever was one. Did Hugh Kenner, a truly great lit critic, ever publish anything in this Easter Bastion of Ignorance? No. By the way, Kenner and O'Connor were both devout Catholics. I am not, if anyone is interested.