Customer Reviews

The Story About the Story: Great Writers Explore Great Literature

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We want to read all the greats in literature but don't have time. We want to think critically and really interpret the work, but understanding the writing of Kafka, T.S. Eliot, and Chekov is far removed from the "reading for pleasure" impulse when we do have time to enjoy a book.

Here in "The Story About the Story," from Tin House Books, editor J.C. Hallman does the work for us. He presents us with over 400 pages of great writers who are reading and thinking about great writers. Some of the resultant essays are interpretive, some are analytical, some are envious. Above all, they hold all writers to the highest standards and honor the sheer power of writing to reach people: heart, mind and soul.

Hallman calls this collection not criticism or debate but a "personal literary analysis - criticism that contemplates rather than argues." I've often disliked the core element of some literary criticism for presuming it is within our right to interpret what an author meant, wrote, or should have written. Hallman agrees "Criticism should limit its concerns to what a writer has attempted to express and how he has attempted to express it."

There are more than 30 essays in The Story About the Story, combining a shared love of words, reading, and writing. They come to us from people who fully understand the labor and struggles involved in writing a book, and they allow us to "celebrate the work, rather than exhaust it."

If you love literature, don't borrow "The Story About the Story," because you'll never give it back. Buy it.

Helen Gallagher, author
Release Your Writing: Book Publishing, Your Way

The Story About the Story: Great writers explore Great literature- 5 stars
What are the odds that all 31 critical essays collected in one anthology will not "murder to dissect" their subjects? Anyone who has felt the "ice axe" of great books melting the sea frozen inside their soul in Kafka's words or felt physically as if the top of their head was being taken off, as Emily Dickinson did, while reading, and then consulted the cold dead letter of criticism on the book that so moved them, will tell you the odds are over a 31,000 to 1. After all, the vast suffocating array of "published criticism" almost always kills the subject dead. For every one life and lit affirming essay, there are 1000's that are no better than authorial and textual autopsies which only rarely are even polite enough to bemoan the fact that the author and his work had to die first. So, finding an anthologist wise enough to collect and publish 31 essays which defy those odds is a statistical and critical anomaly, and cause for celebration.
How did he do it? Well, to start with, the editor, J.C. Hallman) describes himself as "no scholar." Of course, being a scholar, as generations of graduate students have found to their dismay, is often the way to insure the text is DOA, and the lecture or scholarly article studies only its remains and embalms and entombs them somewhere in "the critical cannon." Instead, Hallam and his 30 other selected essayists, write creative fiction or poetry elsewhere, professionally. However, being a great writer or poet alone, far from guarantees the critical deftness and tact shown in almost all these essays. The rare fellowship of the book collected here all share at least 2 other qualities necessary for great critical essayists:
1. They come to praise not bury what they study, and that attitude is, I propose a sine qua non for great criticism which they all share. In Susan Sontag's words, quoted in Hallman's introduction at page 9, almost all, if not all of these essayists also" serve the work of art, not usurp its place, " and

2. They use all or almost all the same creative energy and skill and style they must use in their own creative works to celebrate and let breathe the creative energy and skill and style in the author and work they study. In James Woods' words also quoted in Hallam's excellent introduction, these essays are not in fact especially analytical but are instead "persuasive redescriptions" which " tell a good story" about the story they are criticizing.

Again, for all those ex graduate lit students like me, that means these essayists take the "anal" out of analysis, and rightfully refuse to force the works they study through any Freudian or Talmudic or other philosophical, psychological, religious or literary sieve. Instead, all or almost all 31 essayists somehow celebrate the miracle and mystery of great literature and manage in one of the essayists, Wallace Stegner's words, to "keep the body alive while it is being studied."
Who should read this book?
At its best, as here, the critical essay has tremendous sweep and scope, and there are "gifts" here for all types of literary lovers. Those who love poetry will be amazed at how Sven Birkerts can read Keats "Ode to autumn" so closely and only enrich our understanding of the sound and sense and spirit of the poem. They will be no less amazed watching over his shoulder, as one great poet, Seamus Heany's, learns from another, T.S. Eliot. And, when that experience is over, they should see that Heany's own essay follows the rules of the road for his own poetic odyssey: "in the realm of poetry, as in the realm of consciousness, there is no end to the possible learnings that can take place." There are four more essays on poets or poetry in general and all have their pleasures and rewards: a quirky cosmopolitan eastern European poet's negative view of America's Robert Frost from Czeslaw Milosz; Randall Jarrell's perceptive, celebratory rescuing of Marianne Moore's poems from merely carping criticism and neglect in favor of "poets who ought not to be allowed to throw elegies in her grave;" Edward Hirsch's wise advice on ":How to read a poem and fall in love with poetry: and Robert Hass' extended appreciation of Robert Lowell's "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket."
Those who love fiction have the widest field to romp through, and even have 2 essays on Catcher in the Rye to catch them, if necessary, before they fall off the deep critical end. I won't recap all of them, however, the fact that there are 2 astoundingly creative and rewarding essays on Kafka by 2 great writers, Nabokov and Milan Kundera, and 2 equally gifted, if also eccentric essays on Herman Melville by Albert Camus and D.H. Lawrence, shows the multitude of creative riches here. Those who need reminding how gifted a critic Albert Camus was, or how larger than life Lawrence was discussing life or literature, will rediscover that all here. But there is so much more. Even sub-specialist admirers of the short story genre, like me, will find an astonishing 6 rewarding essays here: John Wood's exceptional study of Chekhov, the editor's rescue of Henry James, "The Turn of the Screw" from mediocre criticism; Michael Chabon's entertaining essay on the other James, the ghost story writer, M.R. James, Fred Setterberg's travelogue mediations on Hemmingway's "Big Two Hearted river, Frank O'Connor's far from PC but nonetheless fascinating speculations on why, in his opinion, Katherine Mansfield lacked the heart needed to be a great writer , and Wallace Stegner's beautiful appreciation of one of Steinbeck's rare short stories, "Flight."
There is even more here for more readers and that is proven by the inclusion of Alain DeBotton on Proust and Geoff Dyer on the abuses of "state of the fart" academic criticism which is a "crime against literature." Even while recounting his self- defensive burning of a "dementorish" collection of critical essays that was otherwise sucking all life and joy out of the joyful Lawrence, Dyer's essay, like all the essays does more than just brilliantly tell us what critical essays should not be. Thus, Dyer reminds us that Lawrence's own literary criticism followed the "imaginative line " and one poet's poem about another, like Auden's elegy for Yeats or Brodsky's Elegy for Auden are criticism in the best, creative, imaginative sense.
The jacket cover of this book lodges the only fair critical complaint about this anthology: "the problem with this book; too many irresistible things." However, that's a small price to pay. Maybe most of you knew all these essayists already, but many like me will discover or at least re-discover writers and essayists, to read at length. In the meantime, we can read generous, gorgeous selections of them here.

How do writers react to other writers? Here's thirty responses. They capture what their collator calls "creative criticism," and while "this temporal splatter of essays" stays messy in its seeming refusal to order the selections in an always logical order, their "inconvenient realities" may better address the elusive but identifiable craft (or lack) inherent. For, this volume convenes the studies of experts who lack tenure worries. They also largely ignore academic stodginess. They use their personal stories to address what they like and don't like in their predecessors' fictional works.

It begins with Charles D'Ambrosio's juxtaposition of his brother's suicide with Salinger's "Catcher on the Rye." After this, Virginia Woolf expounds on Hemingway's "Men Without Women." The essays go on, rearing up against each other, and Hallman's arrangement while eluding my easy grasp does challenge the reader to puzzle out his strategy. Rushdie on "The Wizard of Oz," Heaney on T.S. Eliot, Nabokov laboriously correcting etymological blunders by critics of "The Metamorphosis" exemplify the masters who weigh in.

But, mingling we find Dagoberto Gilb reflecting on his own Mexican mother's relationships with stepfathers and other men in light of Cormac McCarthy's similar portrayals in his Border Trilogy. Hallman advances what ticked him off years ago about how critics misread "The Turn of the Screw," and we get related and impassioned essays by such as D.H. Lawrence on "Moby Dick" and, for once, following it, Geoff Dyer's inspired rant on D.H. from his "Out of Sheer Rage." On the other hand, Phyllis Rose and Alain de Botton share their readings of Proust separated by nine entries. Camus on Melville nears the end of the collection, far away from D.H.L.

For one, don't trust the title. Susan Sontag's "Loving Dostoevsky" turns out to be about Leonid Tsypkin's novel "Summer in Baden-Baden." David Lodge in fine form surveys "Waugh's Comic Wasteland" but stopped short of the later works; Milan Kundera on Kafka wanders about as much as he narrows in, a delightful quality shared by E.B. White on "Walden."

I'll end with what many readers might do themselves, a short list of a few favorite quotations. Here's my three. Walter Kirn happens to be my age more or less; he and I read "Catcher in the Rye" the same year of high school; his was by assignment, mine by choice. Both of us felt the same: "The learning, sophistication, and experience that Holden threw away in a few days would have lit up my small-town high school for a year." (305)

Lodge in Waugh defines their shared genre (for Lodge too is a bit underrated but for me one of the leading novelists today, light in touch but weighty in meaning): "Satire in any era is a kind of writing that draws its energy and fuels its imagination from an essentially critical and subversive view of the world, seizing with delight on absurdities, anomalies, and contradictions in human conduct. It is not the disposable wrapping around a set of positive moral precepts." (368) While Lodge's essay dispensed with the personal touch early on, it remained for me a highlight, clarifying as it happens some difficulties with Waugh that I had when recently tackling "Vile Bodies."

Finally, Kundera uses his own experience of Prague under totalitarian rule to delve into Kafka. Life without secrets may appeal to party hacks or State functionaries. "One big family" becomes the mythic ideal for society. I wondered as today we wonder about the reach of Google or Facebook, identity theft and corporate control, or the exchange of data for discounts from franchises and retailers, how much more rather than less applicable Kundera's warnings might be. How might Hallman's colleagues-- academics and critics enamored of the reach of globalization and online media, 24/7 openness, always being wired and tapped into and on call-- react to this?

"Lyrical souls who like to preach the abolition of secrets and transparency of private life do not realize the nature of the process they are unleashing. The starting point of totalitarianism resembles the beginning of 'The Trial': you'll be taken unawares in your bed. They'll come just as your mother and father used to." (391-2)

Not the volume I'd have expected when opening it to find such a topical observation, but it proves the efficacy of many insights gathered here under literary criticism. As we humanists insist to our dwindling enrollments, these perspectives on life as well as letters demand attention. This volume fills a gap in the shelf, where students of life and of literature find a connection and a challenge to the status quo in a time where the demands of profit and commodity overwhelm the sensitive and the skeptical voices insisting upon introspection, ideals, and intellectual power. (P.S. I have reviewed also Hallman's non-fiction "The Chess Artist," "The Devil is a Gentleman," and "In Utopia," as well as his recent story debut, "The Hospital for Bad Poets.")