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American Audacity: In Defense of Literary Daring
Over the last decade William Giraldi has established himself as a charismatic and uncompromising literary essayist, “a literature-besotted Midas of prose” (Cynthia Ozick). Now, American Audacity gathers a selection of his most powerful considerations of American writers and themes—a “gorgeous fury of language and sensibility” (Walter Kirn)—including an introductory call to arms for twenty-first-century American literature, and a new appreciation of James Baldwin’s genius for nonfiction.
With potent insights into the storied tradition of American letters, and written with a “commitment to the dynamism and dimensions of language,” American Audacity considers giants from the past (Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Harper Lee, Denis Johnson), some of our most well-known living critics and novelists (Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, Katie Roiphe, Cormac McCarthy, Allan Gurganus, Elizabeth Spencer), as well as those cultural-literary themes that have concerned Giraldi as an American novelist (bestsellers, the “problem” of Catholic fiction, the art of hate mail, and his viral essay on bibliophilia).
Demanding that literature be audacious, and urgent in its convictions, American Audacity is itself an act of intellectual daring, a compendium shot through with Giraldi’s “emboldened and emboldening critical voice” (Sven Birkerts). At a time when literature is threatened by ceaseless electronic bombardment, Giraldi argues that literature “must do what literature has always done: facilitate those silent spaces, remain steadfastly itself in its employment of slowness, interiority, grace, and in its marshaling of aesthetic sophistication and complexity.”
American Audacity is ultimately an assertion of intelligence and discernment from a maker of “perfectly paced prose” (The New Yorker), a book that reaffirms the pleasure and wisdom of the deepest literary values.
With potent insights into the storied tradition of American letters, and written with a “commitment to the dynamism and dimensions of language,” American Audacity considers giants from the past (Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Harper Lee, Denis Johnson), some of our most well-known living critics and novelists (Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, Katie Roiphe, Cormac McCarthy, Allan Gurganus, Elizabeth Spencer), as well as those cultural-literary themes that have concerned Giraldi as an American novelist (bestsellers, the “problem” of Catholic fiction, the art of hate mail, and his viral essay on bibliophilia).
Demanding that literature be audacious, and urgent in its convictions, American Audacity is itself an act of intellectual daring, a compendium shot through with Giraldi’s “emboldened and emboldening critical voice” (Sven Birkerts). At a time when literature is threatened by ceaseless electronic bombardment, Giraldi argues that literature “must do what literature has always done: facilitate those silent spaces, remain steadfastly itself in its employment of slowness, interiority, grace, and in its marshaling of aesthetic sophistication and complexity.”
American Audacity is ultimately an assertion of intelligence and discernment from a maker of “perfectly paced prose” (The New Yorker), a book that reaffirms the pleasure and wisdom of the deepest literary values.
462 pages, Hardcover
Published August 21, 2018
28 people are currently reading
298 people want to read
About the author
William Giraldi
10 books101 followersWilliam Giraldi is author of the novels Busy Monsters, Hold the Dark (now a Netflix film), and About Face, the memoir The Hero's Body, and a collection of literary criticism, American Audacity (all published by W.W. Norton). He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and is Master Lecturer in the Writing Program at Boston University.
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
November 5, 2018
There are 2 points of news about Giraldi's collection of essays: how well he writes and the penetrating intelligence of his observations about American literature, past and present. He can turn a phrase and make a point with as much music as anyone I've read lately. He's a joy to read.
These are essays in 3 groupings: literature and reading in general, an assessment of well-known critics from Lionel Trilling to Harold Bloom, and an assessment of writers and their works from Poe to Richard Ford's most recent memoir of his parents.
My copy bristles with page points, but it's no exaggeration to say every page contains some epiphanic reveal or aphoristic phrase you want to remember. He deeply appreciates Flannery O'Connor, for instance, repeating Padgett Powell's pronouncement of her as "the goddesshead" of the dark forces in our literature. Or he can dazzle by dismissing the famous "biblical" bent to Cormac McCarthy's writing as more Hellenic than Hebraic, though he reminds us that Homer did everything much earlier. Or he can directly damn an author as he does James Franco for his treatments of both McCarthy and William Faulkner. It's all convincing wisdom framed in the gold of his breathtaking prose. A wonderful collection of essays I'm sure I'll return to again and again.
These are essays in 3 groupings: literature and reading in general, an assessment of well-known critics from Lionel Trilling to Harold Bloom, and an assessment of writers and their works from Poe to Richard Ford's most recent memoir of his parents.
My copy bristles with page points, but it's no exaggeration to say every page contains some epiphanic reveal or aphoristic phrase you want to remember. He deeply appreciates Flannery O'Connor, for instance, repeating Padgett Powell's pronouncement of her as "the goddesshead" of the dark forces in our literature. Or he can dazzle by dismissing the famous "biblical" bent to Cormac McCarthy's writing as more Hellenic than Hebraic, though he reminds us that Homer did everything much earlier. Or he can directly damn an author as he does James Franco for his treatments of both McCarthy and William Faulkner. It's all convincing wisdom framed in the gold of his breathtaking prose. A wonderful collection of essays I'm sure I'll return to again and again.
December 20, 2018
Though better known as the novelist who wrote the now-Netflixed Hold the Dark, William Giraldi has over the last decade been amassing a mighty corpus of literary criticism.
Two tendencies set Giraldi's essays apart from those of his peers. First, he pays close attention to style, his own and others', taking pains to point out the beauties and infelicities of the writers he reviews and to flaunt his own gift for alliteration, allusion, and irony. Second, Giraldi's attitude toward literature could not be more unfashionable, since he insists on artistic quality, visionary capacity, and moral seriousness rather than obvious political relevance or pop pleasures.
He quotes the critical giants of yesteryear (Blackmur, Trilling, Tate, Hardwick) and values the canon for its strenuous example to the living writer. While he rejects any religious mission for the writer in an essay on "the problems of the Catholic novelist," he does insist on the novel's spiritual telos:
A thick collection of Giraldi's essays, then, is especially welcome this year, when it seems we will never be freed from the reduction of all literary and cultural commentary to "fascist, Nazi, Hannah Arendt, age of Trump" etc.: in short, all politics, all the time.
This compendious collection includes learned appreciations of canonical figures (Poe, Melville), reviews of or introductions to contemporary writers (Giraldi has a particular affinity for Southern authors: see his mammoth, novella-length profile of Allan Gurganus), tributes to precursor critics (Trilling, Bloom, Epstein, Ozick), and impassioned or tart comment on contemporary phenomena from the 2013 terror attack in Boston (Giraldi's hometown) to the Fifty Shades of Grey craze.
It also contains what must be the most judicious assessment of To Kill a Mockingbird I've ever come across. Today, commentators treat this novel either with treacly piety or acid cynicism, but Giraldi persuasively argues for its fine, even superlative prose and its faults of ethical construction. It is an evocative reanimation of a Southern childhood told in the voice of a sharp, sardonic adult woman who remembers what it was like to be a girl ("Harper Lee has always deserved more applause for the smooth stride of her style"); but it is also fatally marred by its passive saint of a hero who delivers airy nostrums rather than possessing moral fiber:
As that final phrase indicates, we shouldn't let Giraldi's love of the canon or insistence on a literature irreducible to politics give us the wrong idea about his politics. That American Audacity's title echoes a famous Obama slogan is perhaps no accident: despite the occasional tilt in the direction of neoconservatism (as in an appreciation of Joseph Epstein, originally published in The New Criterion), Giraldi's belief in the separation of transcendent art from quotidian ideology disguises no right-wing agenda. Rather, Giraldi seems to see himself as belonging to a broad liberal tradition encompassing such obviously non-conservative figures as Hazlitt, Whitman, Wilde, Baldwin.
In a great essay on the latter, Giraldi emphasizes Baldwin as a severe (Giraldian) reviewer who didn't hesitate to damn all manner of left-wing or gay or black fiction as ill-written or propagandistic. Giraldi quotes a thesis you might not hear from Baldwin's most ardent admirers today: "all artists are divorced from and even necessarily opposed to any system whatever."
(Along these lines, the only two capital-P political statements I counted in these essays are impeccably left-of-center: one is a lament over the police killing of black citizens and the other a scorching call for gun control in the wake of the Newtown massacre: "Your right to play with and profit from utensils of mass murder does not exceed our right to keep our kids alive.")
Giraldi's is a liberalism of the individual, backed by his belief that literature is the urgent expression not of an ideological cause or a group identity but a singular style of perceiving the world. He is not, for that reason, a pure aesthete, even though he maintains that "the right words matter." "Right" here implies goodness as well as precision. In a judgment against Carl Van Vechten, the white impresario and bon vivant of the Harlem Renaissance, Giraldi writes:
Hence the possible overkill in his denunciation of Fifty Shades of Grey, which he charges, along with other romance novels, of teaching "a scurvy lesson: enslavement to the passions is a ticket to happiness."
These views also inform his contempt not only for popular fiction but also for contemporary academe, which I found to be about a generation out of date. While he writes with well-researched fairness about Harold Bloom and Stanley Fish in these pages, he also blames the English department's anti-aesthetic sensibilities (and he's perhaps more right than wrong about that, at least as far as published research goes) on "Derrida's and de Man's cynical rhetoric against meaning."
But even a decade ago when I started graduate school, Derrida and de Man were as superannuated as Lionel Trilling or Irving Howe, and the only people who still quoted them were the eccentric aesthetes. Deconstruction, that last stand of Romanticism, which found the sublime in the abyssal unmeaning of the text, has been supplanted in this century by variants on a technocratic historicism of which perhaps the alleged rapist Franco Moretti, with his polemics not against meaning but against reading itself, might be taken as the figurehead. In other words, I don't disagree with Giraldi's literary values, only his choice of targets: he is fighting the last war.
Somewhat apologetically, Giraldi defends the distinct Americanness of his attitude toward literature and life in this book's introduction: "America began in audacity. We're a nation of escapees toiling toward our own authenticity." But those who have followed Giraldi's career as essayist may feel that the collection's Americentricism leads to the exclusion of weighty Euro-themed pieces (on Tolstoy, Freud, Brecht) in favor of slight reviews devoted to more minor U.S. figures.
Speaking of the latter, I don't see why Giraldi's 2012 New York Times review of Alix Ohlin's fiction—the essay that made his name, and made it notorious in some quarters—should have been left out of these pages. (See my review of Hold the Dark for a defense of Giraldi's critical severity in that infamous instance.) Did Giraldi or his editors omit Ohlin to avoid controversy? If so, such a decision can't be called audacious.
Like all enthusiasts of the canon (and I know this because I am one), Giraldi sometimes has a tendency to make of the past's great works a single-voiced chorus shaming the present, even though he shows in other places that he knows better (as when he mocks "false golden-age nostalgia"). Yet the Victorian sages and the Victorian aesthetes were at odds, the New York Intellectuals and the New Critics were not the same—even if they tended to write better prose than we do. Likewise, I started at this parenthetical proposal:
Wilde and Baldwin would have found one another insufferable! It's the stuff of odd-couple comedy: imagine Baldwin pronouncing Wilde a frivolous fop, and Wilde judging Baldwin a dull sermonizer—and neither of them would even be wrong, exactly, only right according to each of their particular sensibilities. It may be in the nature of "cutting minds" not to be "kindred," which poses a problem for the proposed marriage of art and morals.
Nevertheless, I don't fault Giraldi for such statements, even though I may disagree with them. They are the products of wide reading, fierce intellection, and contagious enthusiasm. It's one of the virtues of argumentative essay collections that there should be something stimulating, even or especially stimuli to thoughtful quarrels, on every page. American Audacity is a worthy candidate for the tradition it courts: that of the great public critics in English, from Johnson and Hazlitt to Bloom and Ozick.
Two tendencies set Giraldi's essays apart from those of his peers. First, he pays close attention to style, his own and others', taking pains to point out the beauties and infelicities of the writers he reviews and to flaunt his own gift for alliteration, allusion, and irony. Second, Giraldi's attitude toward literature could not be more unfashionable, since he insists on artistic quality, visionary capacity, and moral seriousness rather than obvious political relevance or pop pleasures.
He quotes the critical giants of yesteryear (Blackmur, Trilling, Tate, Hardwick) and values the canon for its strenuous example to the living writer. While he rejects any religious mission for the writer in an essay on "the problems of the Catholic novelist," he does insist on the novel's spiritual telos:
A novel should indeed be groping after some form of the metaphysical, a benediction to unseen powers, the upholding of the mysterium tremendum, those insistent inklings of the numinous.
A thick collection of Giraldi's essays, then, is especially welcome this year, when it seems we will never be freed from the reduction of all literary and cultural commentary to "fascist, Nazi, Hannah Arendt, age of Trump" etc.: in short, all politics, all the time.
This compendious collection includes learned appreciations of canonical figures (Poe, Melville), reviews of or introductions to contemporary writers (Giraldi has a particular affinity for Southern authors: see his mammoth, novella-length profile of Allan Gurganus), tributes to precursor critics (Trilling, Bloom, Epstein, Ozick), and impassioned or tart comment on contemporary phenomena from the 2013 terror attack in Boston (Giraldi's hometown) to the Fifty Shades of Grey craze.
It also contains what must be the most judicious assessment of To Kill a Mockingbird I've ever come across. Today, commentators treat this novel either with treacly piety or acid cynicism, but Giraldi persuasively argues for its fine, even superlative prose and its faults of ethical construction. It is an evocative reanimation of a Southern childhood told in the voice of a sharp, sardonic adult woman who remembers what it was like to be a girl ("Harper Lee has always deserved more applause for the smooth stride of her style"); but it is also fatally marred by its passive saint of a hero who delivers airy nostrums rather than possessing moral fiber:
He has all the right motions of the principled man but none of the fervor, the fed-up disgust required to assault the toxic tropisms of an entire segment of our society, those entrenched inequalities that cause the innocent to suffer.
As that final phrase indicates, we shouldn't let Giraldi's love of the canon or insistence on a literature irreducible to politics give us the wrong idea about his politics. That American Audacity's title echoes a famous Obama slogan is perhaps no accident: despite the occasional tilt in the direction of neoconservatism (as in an appreciation of Joseph Epstein, originally published in The New Criterion), Giraldi's belief in the separation of transcendent art from quotidian ideology disguises no right-wing agenda. Rather, Giraldi seems to see himself as belonging to a broad liberal tradition encompassing such obviously non-conservative figures as Hazlitt, Whitman, Wilde, Baldwin.
In a great essay on the latter, Giraldi emphasizes Baldwin as a severe (Giraldian) reviewer who didn't hesitate to damn all manner of left-wing or gay or black fiction as ill-written or propagandistic. Giraldi quotes a thesis you might not hear from Baldwin's most ardent admirers today: "all artists are divorced from and even necessarily opposed to any system whatever."
(Along these lines, the only two capital-P political statements I counted in these essays are impeccably left-of-center: one is a lament over the police killing of black citizens and the other a scorching call for gun control in the wake of the Newtown massacre: "Your right to play with and profit from utensils of mass murder does not exceed our right to keep our kids alive.")
Giraldi's is a liberalism of the individual, backed by his belief that literature is the urgent expression not of an ideological cause or a group identity but a singular style of perceiving the world. He is not, for that reason, a pure aesthete, even though he maintains that "the right words matter." "Right" here implies goodness as well as precision. In a judgment against Carl Van Vechten, the white impresario and bon vivant of the Harlem Renaissance, Giraldi writes:
Van Vechten's true sin was not the crimes for which propriety would condemn him—from boozing to buggery, all that windy worship of Bacchus—but rather his blindness to the fact that beauty presupposes morality, that aestheticism is empty without ethics.
Hence the possible overkill in his denunciation of Fifty Shades of Grey, which he charges, along with other romance novels, of teaching "a scurvy lesson: enslavement to the passions is a ticket to happiness."
These views also inform his contempt not only for popular fiction but also for contemporary academe, which I found to be about a generation out of date. While he writes with well-researched fairness about Harold Bloom and Stanley Fish in these pages, he also blames the English department's anti-aesthetic sensibilities (and he's perhaps more right than wrong about that, at least as far as published research goes) on "Derrida's and de Man's cynical rhetoric against meaning."
But even a decade ago when I started graduate school, Derrida and de Man were as superannuated as Lionel Trilling or Irving Howe, and the only people who still quoted them were the eccentric aesthetes. Deconstruction, that last stand of Romanticism, which found the sublime in the abyssal unmeaning of the text, has been supplanted in this century by variants on a technocratic historicism of which perhaps the alleged rapist Franco Moretti, with his polemics not against meaning but against reading itself, might be taken as the figurehead. In other words, I don't disagree with Giraldi's literary values, only his choice of targets: he is fighting the last war.
Somewhat apologetically, Giraldi defends the distinct Americanness of his attitude toward literature and life in this book's introduction: "America began in audacity. We're a nation of escapees toiling toward our own authenticity." But those who have followed Giraldi's career as essayist may feel that the collection's Americentricism leads to the exclusion of weighty Euro-themed pieces (on Tolstoy, Freud, Brecht) in favor of slight reviews devoted to more minor U.S. figures.
Speaking of the latter, I don't see why Giraldi's 2012 New York Times review of Alix Ohlin's fiction—the essay that made his name, and made it notorious in some quarters—should have been left out of these pages. (See my review of Hold the Dark for a defense of Giraldi's critical severity in that infamous instance.) Did Giraldi or his editors omit Ohlin to avoid controversy? If so, such a decision can't be called audacious.
Like all enthusiasts of the canon (and I know this because I am one), Giraldi sometimes has a tendency to make of the past's great works a single-voiced chorus shaming the present, even though he shows in other places that he knows better (as when he mocks "false golden-age nostalgia"). Yet the Victorian sages and the Victorian aesthetes were at odds, the New York Intellectuals and the New Critics were not the same—even if they tended to write better prose than we do. Likewise, I started at this parenthetical proposal:
(While Baldwin doesn't mention Wilde anywhere in his work, you wish that he had: it's hard to find two cutting minds more kindred than theirs.)
Wilde and Baldwin would have found one another insufferable! It's the stuff of odd-couple comedy: imagine Baldwin pronouncing Wilde a frivolous fop, and Wilde judging Baldwin a dull sermonizer—and neither of them would even be wrong, exactly, only right according to each of their particular sensibilities. It may be in the nature of "cutting minds" not to be "kindred," which poses a problem for the proposed marriage of art and morals.
Nevertheless, I don't fault Giraldi for such statements, even though I may disagree with them. They are the products of wide reading, fierce intellection, and contagious enthusiasm. It's one of the virtues of argumentative essay collections that there should be something stimulating, even or especially stimuli to thoughtful quarrels, on every page. American Audacity is a worthy candidate for the tradition it courts: that of the great public critics in English, from Johnson and Hazlitt to Bloom and Ozick.
December 23, 2018
Maybe could have been subtitled: "In Defense of Literary Snobbery", but either way it was sure fun to read. The compilation of articles written over the years suffers from the plight of almost all these efforts, namely, it can be uneven. Yet, there is much fodder in these pages and certainly, one walks away feeling edified, challenged, and I admit, a little more highbrow than when I started.
December 18, 2018
Smart, opinionated, I must add this book to my overflowing library. I complain about uncommitted lackluster book reviews, not Giraldi. He has something to say and strong ways of saying it. Nathaniel Rich reviews the book in the New York Times and the first paragraph is exemplary:
"If literature, as William Giraldi writes in American Audacity, is “the one religion worth having,” then Giraldi is our most tenacious revivalist preacher, his sermons galvanized by a righteous exhortative energy, a mastery of the sacred texts and — unique in contemporary literary criticism — an enthusiasm for moralizing in defense of high standards. “Do I really expect Americans to sit down with ‘Adam Bede’ or ‘Clarissa’ after all the professional and domestic hurly-burly of their day?” he asks in an essay bemoaning “Fifty Shades of Grey.” “Pardon me, but yes, I do.” The only insincerity there is the request for pardon: Giraldi is defiantly, lavishly unforgiving."
"If literature, as William Giraldi writes in American Audacity, is “the one religion worth having,” then Giraldi is our most tenacious revivalist preacher, his sermons galvanized by a righteous exhortative energy, a mastery of the sacred texts and — unique in contemporary literary criticism — an enthusiasm for moralizing in defense of high standards. “Do I really expect Americans to sit down with ‘Adam Bede’ or ‘Clarissa’ after all the professional and domestic hurly-burly of their day?” he asks in an essay bemoaning “Fifty Shades of Grey.” “Pardon me, but yes, I do.” The only insincerity there is the request for pardon: Giraldi is defiantly, lavishly unforgiving."
November 9, 2018
Maybe I've just been out of academia too long, but this collection of essays struck me as overwritten in style and obvious in content. I found little new in his writing on established authors (I admit I skipped some of the essays on newer authors). Giraldi likes interesting style, as do I, but he goes a bit overboard with some frequency. I agreed with many of his stances, and I especially liked his introduction and his essay on the problem of the Catholic novelist. But overall a disappointing collection.
December 15, 2018
Great set of essays from someone who loves books and reading. It seems like I've read three books once I've looked up some of the old articles, books and forgotten critics and authors that Giraldi referenced in his essays (and he references A LOT!). A great Xmas gift and was surprised not to see it listed in the NY Times top 100.
PS And for the record I did read Clarissa (twice, actually for a course and then in a 'fun' reading group in my graduate year).
PS And for the record I did read Clarissa (twice, actually for a course and then in a 'fun' reading group in my graduate year).
November 8, 2018
If you read the New York Times Book Review, the New York Book Review, the London Book Review, or even Slate, you've read this kind of intelligent critical work before. Giraldi is unusually good at it, and his work is distinguished by a passion that often goes right up to the edge of sympathy without quite going beyond. He's very smart, and he cares a lot. I particularly enjoyed his essay on Harper Lee, whom he believes was obviously manipulated into the release of an early book she had no plans to release while she was in full possession of herself. On the whole, however, I'm already well served by reading the work of a wide variety of critics, and didn't gain a lot by the intensive focus on this particular one.
December 21, 2018
My apologies to Mr. Giraldi, because he doesn't think a reviewer’s feelings should matter, but I loved his book.
It’s the best kind of book about books, the kind that you can’t stop thinking about for days after you’ve finished reading it, and eventually find yourself wishing you could have coffee with the author and just talk/argue with him directly in conversation for a few hours. (Admittedly, I’m always going to have a soft spot for someone who quotes my beloved Robertson Davies.)
The relatively polemical pieces at the beginning were entertaining, but they were also admittedly some rather low-hanging fruit; seeing someone with this sort of mind take on Fifty Shades of Gray is like watching Muhammad Ali beat up a playground bully. It’s fun and the victim richly deserves it, but it is a bit unfair.
That essay in particular made me a bit uncomfortable. Mr. Giraldi gives lip service to the idea that not everyone loves reading and that’s okay, but it’s clearly not, because he complains throughout about Americans’ infamous lack of attention to reading in general, and serious books in particular, with lines like “Tell me the books you read and I’ll tell you who you are; tell me you choose to read no books and I’ll tell you there is no you.” (Or elsewhere, in a funnier, less Brillat-Savarin mode: “But I trust you'll agree that the possession of books is not identical to the possession of shoes. Someone with thousands of books is someone you want to talk to; someone with thousands of shoes is someone you suspect of soul-death.”)
He returns to this in the essay “Against Dullness,” when he observes that “Wide and deep readers of literature have the privilege of a multihued perception, of experiencing life with a fullness and profundity that nonreaders will never know.”
But he keeps forgetting that the operative word in that last line is “privilege.” I’m as tired of being told to “check my privilege” as anyone (thanks, it’s right here, right where I left it), but those of us who love books often forget that most people are not readers. And that it really is okay.
I have a dyslexic friend who, unsurprisingly, doesn’t enjoy reading. He does enjoy art, cooking, gardening, collecting, dancing, etc., and his senior quote in our high school yearbook was the famous line from Auntie Mame, “Live! Live! Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!” To suggest that his life lacks perception or fullness—or anything, really—just because he’s not lucky enough to also be a reader would be fall-down funny to anybody who’s met him—or anyone like him.
I was also fascinated by the discussion of style that ran throughout the book, particularly Mr. Giraldi’s insistence on the connection between style and morality. On the one hand, he makes a great case for it, and as an editor in many ways I agree with statements like “Every novel is true or false in its language before it’s true or false in anything else.” (The Hedonist)
But then he takes it further, and I start to doubt.
“In literary art, style is not severed from substance; style permits substance, allows theme or plot or character to be born, which is why the literary artist’s first concern is always language: without that nothing can happen, nothing else can hold. ‘Style is matter,’ said Nabokov (the italics are his), which was just a restatement of Goethe’s notion that ‘a writer’s style is a true reflection of his inner life.’ In that way, style amounts to an embodiment of morality. (American Bestsellers)”
Is Giraldi really saying that a book can’t be beautifully written and immoral, at the same time? That can’t be right. I don’t mean murder mysteries or descriptions of killers, of course (no one’s suggesting that Agatha Christie was really a serial killer manqué), nor do I mean obscene in the typically prudish “let’s ban sex scenes” sense.
I’m thinking about books like Updike’s first Rabbit novel. It’s gorgeously written, because that’s his style. But there’s a seriously unpleasant scene in which a man forces a woman to perform oral sex upon him, and it’s not treated as a big deal. That, as much as the act itself, made it grotesque; the author clearly didn’t see it as anything serious.
It’s a morally terrible scene, and it killed the Rabbit series for me. I still love Updike’s essays about books (his review of Cheever’s Journals, in which Cheever said mean things about him personally, was remarkably graceful) but I was never able to read him again quite the same way.
I had a similar problem with Saul Bellow, in The Adventures of Augie March. As I wrote in my Goodreads review: “There’s a really painful, dated bit early on, when Augie is describing how the big-shot in his neighborhood used to paw, grope, and generally sexually harass all the young women in his orbit, and it's just shrugged off with a teeth-grindingly clueless excuse, basically saying ‘Well, he was powerful and had money, so the girls never minded.’ Blurgh. Just no.”
Again, it’s a book famous for its great writing and style, but the moral sensibility is, at best, blinkered.
Given his argument, I’d love to hear Mr. Giraldi’s opinion. We’re both in Boston, so maybe someday I’ll find a way to buy him that coffee, and we can talk about books for a while.
Hey, a girl can dream.
Final quibble: I think I’ve quoted him enough to show that I appreciate his prose, but given how rough Mr. Giraldi can be on writers when he thinks they’re being lazy, indulging in clichés or mixing their metaphors, someone should have caught this anatomically confused line of his: “Nobody can tell for certain what breathes in another’s heart…”. (?) (On Literature and Love)
It’s the best kind of book about books, the kind that you can’t stop thinking about for days after you’ve finished reading it, and eventually find yourself wishing you could have coffee with the author and just talk/argue with him directly in conversation for a few hours. (Admittedly, I’m always going to have a soft spot for someone who quotes my beloved Robertson Davies.)
The relatively polemical pieces at the beginning were entertaining, but they were also admittedly some rather low-hanging fruit; seeing someone with this sort of mind take on Fifty Shades of Gray is like watching Muhammad Ali beat up a playground bully. It’s fun and the victim richly deserves it, but it is a bit unfair.
That essay in particular made me a bit uncomfortable. Mr. Giraldi gives lip service to the idea that not everyone loves reading and that’s okay, but it’s clearly not, because he complains throughout about Americans’ infamous lack of attention to reading in general, and serious books in particular, with lines like “Tell me the books you read and I’ll tell you who you are; tell me you choose to read no books and I’ll tell you there is no you.” (Or elsewhere, in a funnier, less Brillat-Savarin mode: “But I trust you'll agree that the possession of books is not identical to the possession of shoes. Someone with thousands of books is someone you want to talk to; someone with thousands of shoes is someone you suspect of soul-death.”)
He returns to this in the essay “Against Dullness,” when he observes that “Wide and deep readers of literature have the privilege of a multihued perception, of experiencing life with a fullness and profundity that nonreaders will never know.”
But he keeps forgetting that the operative word in that last line is “privilege.” I’m as tired of being told to “check my privilege” as anyone (thanks, it’s right here, right where I left it), but those of us who love books often forget that most people are not readers. And that it really is okay.
I have a dyslexic friend who, unsurprisingly, doesn’t enjoy reading. He does enjoy art, cooking, gardening, collecting, dancing, etc., and his senior quote in our high school yearbook was the famous line from Auntie Mame, “Live! Live! Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!” To suggest that his life lacks perception or fullness—or anything, really—just because he’s not lucky enough to also be a reader would be fall-down funny to anybody who’s met him—or anyone like him.
I was also fascinated by the discussion of style that ran throughout the book, particularly Mr. Giraldi’s insistence on the connection between style and morality. On the one hand, he makes a great case for it, and as an editor in many ways I agree with statements like “Every novel is true or false in its language before it’s true or false in anything else.” (The Hedonist)
But then he takes it further, and I start to doubt.
“In literary art, style is not severed from substance; style permits substance, allows theme or plot or character to be born, which is why the literary artist’s first concern is always language: without that nothing can happen, nothing else can hold. ‘Style is matter,’ said Nabokov (the italics are his), which was just a restatement of Goethe’s notion that ‘a writer’s style is a true reflection of his inner life.’ In that way, style amounts to an embodiment of morality. (American Bestsellers)”
Is Giraldi really saying that a book can’t be beautifully written and immoral, at the same time? That can’t be right. I don’t mean murder mysteries or descriptions of killers, of course (no one’s suggesting that Agatha Christie was really a serial killer manqué), nor do I mean obscene in the typically prudish “let’s ban sex scenes” sense.
I’m thinking about books like Updike’s first Rabbit novel. It’s gorgeously written, because that’s his style. But there’s a seriously unpleasant scene in which a man forces a woman to perform oral sex upon him, and it’s not treated as a big deal. That, as much as the act itself, made it grotesque; the author clearly didn’t see it as anything serious.
It’s a morally terrible scene, and it killed the Rabbit series for me. I still love Updike’s essays about books (his review of Cheever’s Journals, in which Cheever said mean things about him personally, was remarkably graceful) but I was never able to read him again quite the same way.
I had a similar problem with Saul Bellow, in The Adventures of Augie March. As I wrote in my Goodreads review: “There’s a really painful, dated bit early on, when Augie is describing how the big-shot in his neighborhood used to paw, grope, and generally sexually harass all the young women in his orbit, and it's just shrugged off with a teeth-grindingly clueless excuse, basically saying ‘Well, he was powerful and had money, so the girls never minded.’ Blurgh. Just no.”
Again, it’s a book famous for its great writing and style, but the moral sensibility is, at best, blinkered.
Given his argument, I’d love to hear Mr. Giraldi’s opinion. We’re both in Boston, so maybe someday I’ll find a way to buy him that coffee, and we can talk about books for a while.
Hey, a girl can dream.
Final quibble: I think I’ve quoted him enough to show that I appreciate his prose, but given how rough Mr. Giraldi can be on writers when he thinks they’re being lazy, indulging in clichés or mixing their metaphors, someone should have caught this anatomically confused line of his: “Nobody can tell for certain what breathes in another’s heart…”. (?) (On Literature and Love)
June 17, 2019
Much, much to my chagrin I'd not heard of this guy. I didn't read the New Republic where he was the literary critic. Happy for this collection. I learned something in every chapter, and every chapter contained an original thought or quote worth writing down.
Recommended for lovers of literature.
Recommended for lovers of literature.
November 27, 2018
"Powys sees the necessity of attaining 'a mind sensitive to rare and gentle things,' a mind adequately armored against the frothy nothings of the hour'" (7).
"Someone with thousands of books is someone you want to talk to; someone with thousands of shoes is someone you suspect of soul-death" (33).
"For readers, what they read is where they've been, and their collections are evidence of the trek" (34).
"...the book's tremendous value is, or course, noneconomic, while most Americans have a hard time respecting anything that has no glint..." (34-35).
"...because Amazon understands that we Americans rather enjoy the hot oppression of endless options, the arson of our calm" (42).
"...his particular appetite for insult seems to have been activated around stationery" (48).
"The Internet didn't create hatred but, true to its name, the Internet caught it. It's the modus operandi of online yokels to be outraged, every few minutes, by some trifle or another, to traffic in 'the nothingness of scorn and noise,' in John Clare's immortal wording" (57).
"Almond's mercy for his correspondents, even for those who wish him harm--one beauty calls for his beheading--is not cynical emulation of Christ, but a measured awareness that people are rotten because they're wounded, lashing out in search of succor" (58).
"When a nation's book taste is in the gutter, you can count on other things soon joining it there, such as that nation's facility for language and thinking, for judgment and morality and spiritual vigor" (76).
"Literature means a striving into the accuracy and surprise of language, into the many folds of understanding..." (78).
"'At least some people are reading.' You've no doubt hear that before. But we don't say of the diabetical obese, 'At least some people are eating'" (89).
"...we Americans are, in the words of comic novelist Peter De Vries, on a 'quantitative quest to fill a qualitative gap'" (110).
"He can wield a phrase when he wants to: 'Some of the books were so flapped and colored they looked like exotic birds incapable of flight'" (157).
"But literature is the most consummate access you can gain to the inner cosmos of another, to the psycho-emotional systems of people wholly different from you, and therein lies its indispensable worth (165-166).
"...he refuses to differentiate between religious books and literature, no does he shrink from saying that millions of the world's most devout--Jews, Christians, Muslims all--worship literary characters less skillfully conceived than Hamlet and Falstaff" (179).
"If Othello and Desdemona never consummated their marriage, 'the heroic Moor's vulnerability to Iago's demonic genius becomes far more understandable'" (181). *I never thought about this before.
"...dozy reviewers with delusions of adequacy" (186).
"'Wisdom is for statues. Humor uncaps our inhibitions, unleashes our energies, seals friendships, patches hurts. Laughing is probably the most alive you can be'" (189).
"It's daily getting more difficult for the notes to rise through the noise..." (190).
"Gurganus: 'Don't talk to mea bout the heroic gentle Reagan. I can tell you otherwise'' (254).
"'Cats cannot make jokes about other cats. We are the only animals with this doubled capacity to take ourselves seriously while sending ourselves up. I see that as shorthand for our spiritual capacity'" (256).
"There are seventy pitchers in the Baseball Hall of Fame and only fourteen catchers. Might this not show you what a diminshed role the receiver in sexual relationships gets accorded? And the catcher, she's calling the shots on the pitcher's mound! Just as in marriage. And yet where is her position of honor? It's always the pitcher. For me it's more symphonically enjoyable to write in the voice of women, because women, especially in the first person and close third person confessional, can admit to more various contradictory and enlarging emotions'" (260).
"There are evolutionary reasons for our fear of the dark: bedded down in a sable thickness on the African savanna..." (327).
"...the narrator is certain that 'perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart.' You rightly think hi a madman, until you run it by your own heart, a heart that has known, if you are honest, the pitch of the perverse" (329).
"Not to say that he gave no thought to posterity, only that someone continually crushed in the molars of melancholy, someone so persistently pestled by circumstance, doesn't have the gumption to manipulate the levers of fame-making" (337).
"If you have any skepticism about how original, how out-and-out-peculiar, Carl Van Vechten was, do a quick survey of all the middle-class, Midwestern white boys who gladly skip college parties to escort middle-aged black women to church functions at which they're the only moon-faced ones in attendance" (341).
"If you aren't burdened by a physical deformity--in your face, no less-- you could underestimate how that deformity influences everything from your handkerchief and handshake to your character and charisma" (343).
"If he were alive today, he'd be the king mosquito with a keyboard, incessant and malarial across the swamps of social media" (344).
"Those peppery Russian Jewesses: always a certain antidote agains homosexuality" (345).
"...'the lesson of civilization is that sooner or later we will fuck everything up'" (385).
"Johnson's narrator intuitively comprehends that love and human goodness are the only redeemers worth having" (418).
"...poetry so insipid it's like listening to an oboe blown by an emphysemic..." (426).
"...a storm-gorged river" (430).
"...in time-stuck nooks of Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas" (438).
"Someone with thousands of books is someone you want to talk to; someone with thousands of shoes is someone you suspect of soul-death" (33).
"For readers, what they read is where they've been, and their collections are evidence of the trek" (34).
"...the book's tremendous value is, or course, noneconomic, while most Americans have a hard time respecting anything that has no glint..." (34-35).
"...because Amazon understands that we Americans rather enjoy the hot oppression of endless options, the arson of our calm" (42).
"...his particular appetite for insult seems to have been activated around stationery" (48).
"The Internet didn't create hatred but, true to its name, the Internet caught it. It's the modus operandi of online yokels to be outraged, every few minutes, by some trifle or another, to traffic in 'the nothingness of scorn and noise,' in John Clare's immortal wording" (57).
"Almond's mercy for his correspondents, even for those who wish him harm--one beauty calls for his beheading--is not cynical emulation of Christ, but a measured awareness that people are rotten because they're wounded, lashing out in search of succor" (58).
"When a nation's book taste is in the gutter, you can count on other things soon joining it there, such as that nation's facility for language and thinking, for judgment and morality and spiritual vigor" (76).
"Literature means a striving into the accuracy and surprise of language, into the many folds of understanding..." (78).
"'At least some people are reading.' You've no doubt hear that before. But we don't say of the diabetical obese, 'At least some people are eating'" (89).
"...we Americans are, in the words of comic novelist Peter De Vries, on a 'quantitative quest to fill a qualitative gap'" (110).
"He can wield a phrase when he wants to: 'Some of the books were so flapped and colored they looked like exotic birds incapable of flight'" (157).
"But literature is the most consummate access you can gain to the inner cosmos of another, to the psycho-emotional systems of people wholly different from you, and therein lies its indispensable worth (165-166).
"...he refuses to differentiate between religious books and literature, no does he shrink from saying that millions of the world's most devout--Jews, Christians, Muslims all--worship literary characters less skillfully conceived than Hamlet and Falstaff" (179).
"If Othello and Desdemona never consummated their marriage, 'the heroic Moor's vulnerability to Iago's demonic genius becomes far more understandable'" (181). *I never thought about this before.
"...dozy reviewers with delusions of adequacy" (186).
"'Wisdom is for statues. Humor uncaps our inhibitions, unleashes our energies, seals friendships, patches hurts. Laughing is probably the most alive you can be'" (189).
"It's daily getting more difficult for the notes to rise through the noise..." (190).
"Gurganus: 'Don't talk to mea bout the heroic gentle Reagan. I can tell you otherwise'' (254).
"'Cats cannot make jokes about other cats. We are the only animals with this doubled capacity to take ourselves seriously while sending ourselves up. I see that as shorthand for our spiritual capacity'" (256).
"There are seventy pitchers in the Baseball Hall of Fame and only fourteen catchers. Might this not show you what a diminshed role the receiver in sexual relationships gets accorded? And the catcher, she's calling the shots on the pitcher's mound! Just as in marriage. And yet where is her position of honor? It's always the pitcher. For me it's more symphonically enjoyable to write in the voice of women, because women, especially in the first person and close third person confessional, can admit to more various contradictory and enlarging emotions'" (260).
"There are evolutionary reasons for our fear of the dark: bedded down in a sable thickness on the African savanna..." (327).
"...the narrator is certain that 'perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart.' You rightly think hi a madman, until you run it by your own heart, a heart that has known, if you are honest, the pitch of the perverse" (329).
"Not to say that he gave no thought to posterity, only that someone continually crushed in the molars of melancholy, someone so persistently pestled by circumstance, doesn't have the gumption to manipulate the levers of fame-making" (337).
"If you have any skepticism about how original, how out-and-out-peculiar, Carl Van Vechten was, do a quick survey of all the middle-class, Midwestern white boys who gladly skip college parties to escort middle-aged black women to church functions at which they're the only moon-faced ones in attendance" (341).
"If you aren't burdened by a physical deformity--in your face, no less-- you could underestimate how that deformity influences everything from your handkerchief and handshake to your character and charisma" (343).
"If he were alive today, he'd be the king mosquito with a keyboard, incessant and malarial across the swamps of social media" (344).
"Those peppery Russian Jewesses: always a certain antidote agains homosexuality" (345).
"...'the lesson of civilization is that sooner or later we will fuck everything up'" (385).
"Johnson's narrator intuitively comprehends that love and human goodness are the only redeemers worth having" (418).
"...poetry so insipid it's like listening to an oboe blown by an emphysemic..." (426).
"...a storm-gorged river" (430).
"...in time-stuck nooks of Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas" (438).
December 8, 2018
William Giraldi’s American Audacity: In Defense of Daring in Literature should be a challenging and rewarding experience for readers who turn to literature not as a pastime or for mere entertainment or confirmation but as a fundamental life resource.
I admire Giraldi’s commitment to language, which is resolute throughout his essays. What, for God’s sake, could matter more in writing? In “the Memoir Now,” he pronounces: “Every book is true or false in its sentences before it’s true or false in facts.” Amen. Years ago, in an elevator in the building where I worked at the time, I heard a woman say to someone, “I don’t care how a book is written. What is the story?” I wasn’t part of the conversation, but I remember thinking that I would never take a book recommendation from such a person.
In “The Bibliophile,” an essay on book collecting, after extolling the physicality of books, Giraldi lays down this memorable one-sentence paragraph: “I’m sorry but your Kindle has no presence.”
Giraldi is almost preternaturally well read, and his book abounds with memorable quotations. In “The Terms of Terror,” he quotes the now largely forgotten Peter DeVries: “There is nothing like calamity to make us forget our troubles.” In “The Promise of Happiness,” he quotes DeVries’ observation that Americans are on “a quantitative quest to fill a qualitative gap.”
Giraldi is enjoyably contemptuous of deconstructionists and other academic cults and isms that rendered much of the teaching of literature in American colleges and universities more or less absurd for something like a quarter of a century.
Just when I was again finding Giraldi’s prose overwrought, along came the saving delight of a sentence as unencumbered as this: “Biographers don’t have it easy.” I clapped.
Giraldi can grow glib and pontifical, occasionally coming too close to resembling that officious, odious and utterly lesser critic William Logan, whom nobody should ever want to come near. Then again, i have to take into consideration what Geraldi says in an essay about Jeffrey Fish: “Joseph Epstein, Essayist Rex, once dumped on Fish’s ‘jauntily confident manner,’ but if the inverse of jaunty confidence is slouching self-doubt, who wants this in a thinker? To read Fish is to commune with a scholar in supreme control of the literature and his own attitudes toward it, a scholar thrillingly authoritative, wholly convinced, giddy with aptitude. This is heaven-sent talent, ladies and gentlemen, regardless of whether or not you’re partial to his assessments: You can’t hit the ball like Serena, and you can’t read Milton like Fish.” In one of the book’s dust jacket blurbs, Sven Birkerts smartly notes that he reads some of what I’ve just quoted as “an inadvertent instance of self-characterization.”
Giraldi revels, repeatedly, in citing cliches committed by others but can himself freely resort to ubiquitous expressions such as “no there there.”
I also have to say that the title and subtitle of the book do not finally seem particularly appropriate. He hasn’t by any means written a book that justifies such naming. What he has given us is a collection of critical and interpretive essays, with certain recurring concerns, written and published in various periodicals over a period of seven years. His introduction tries but does not succeed in pulling the essays together under the advertised aim or purpose.
The final section of American Audacity collects essays about and reviews of individual writers and books. In writing about Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God, Giraldi pinpoints a frequent problem in film adaptations of novels, particularly those in which the most important aspect is the writing itself, the language — words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs. After quoting a passage from McCarthy, Giraldi observes: “Passages such as that reveal why McCarthy, like Faulkner, is so hard to translate to the screen. The lines — deeply interior, pitched toward the soul, pressured with a chaos both visceral and spiritual — embody the imaginative ethos of the story in a manner no image can duplicate.”
Caveat: If you’re intimidated by extreme erudition or inclined to frequent complaint about elitism, there’s every likelihood you’ll not have a very good time with Giraldi. But if you respect erudition and value the sort of adamant, principled elitism Randall Jarrell represented in the previous century, I recommend this book. You will no doubt have quarrels with it, as do I, but isn’t quarreling with a writer you admire one of the pleasures of reading?
I admire Giraldi’s commitment to language, which is resolute throughout his essays. What, for God’s sake, could matter more in writing? In “the Memoir Now,” he pronounces: “Every book is true or false in its sentences before it’s true or false in facts.” Amen. Years ago, in an elevator in the building where I worked at the time, I heard a woman say to someone, “I don’t care how a book is written. What is the story?” I wasn’t part of the conversation, but I remember thinking that I would never take a book recommendation from such a person.
In “The Bibliophile,” an essay on book collecting, after extolling the physicality of books, Giraldi lays down this memorable one-sentence paragraph: “I’m sorry but your Kindle has no presence.”
Giraldi is almost preternaturally well read, and his book abounds with memorable quotations. In “The Terms of Terror,” he quotes the now largely forgotten Peter DeVries: “There is nothing like calamity to make us forget our troubles.” In “The Promise of Happiness,” he quotes DeVries’ observation that Americans are on “a quantitative quest to fill a qualitative gap.”
Giraldi is enjoyably contemptuous of deconstructionists and other academic cults and isms that rendered much of the teaching of literature in American colleges and universities more or less absurd for something like a quarter of a century.
Just when I was again finding Giraldi’s prose overwrought, along came the saving delight of a sentence as unencumbered as this: “Biographers don’t have it easy.” I clapped.
Giraldi can grow glib and pontifical, occasionally coming too close to resembling that officious, odious and utterly lesser critic William Logan, whom nobody should ever want to come near. Then again, i have to take into consideration what Geraldi says in an essay about Jeffrey Fish: “Joseph Epstein, Essayist Rex, once dumped on Fish’s ‘jauntily confident manner,’ but if the inverse of jaunty confidence is slouching self-doubt, who wants this in a thinker? To read Fish is to commune with a scholar in supreme control of the literature and his own attitudes toward it, a scholar thrillingly authoritative, wholly convinced, giddy with aptitude. This is heaven-sent talent, ladies and gentlemen, regardless of whether or not you’re partial to his assessments: You can’t hit the ball like Serena, and you can’t read Milton like Fish.” In one of the book’s dust jacket blurbs, Sven Birkerts smartly notes that he reads some of what I’ve just quoted as “an inadvertent instance of self-characterization.”
Giraldi revels, repeatedly, in citing cliches committed by others but can himself freely resort to ubiquitous expressions such as “no there there.”
I also have to say that the title and subtitle of the book do not finally seem particularly appropriate. He hasn’t by any means written a book that justifies such naming. What he has given us is a collection of critical and interpretive essays, with certain recurring concerns, written and published in various periodicals over a period of seven years. His introduction tries but does not succeed in pulling the essays together under the advertised aim or purpose.
The final section of American Audacity collects essays about and reviews of individual writers and books. In writing about Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God, Giraldi pinpoints a frequent problem in film adaptations of novels, particularly those in which the most important aspect is the writing itself, the language — words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs. After quoting a passage from McCarthy, Giraldi observes: “Passages such as that reveal why McCarthy, like Faulkner, is so hard to translate to the screen. The lines — deeply interior, pitched toward the soul, pressured with a chaos both visceral and spiritual — embody the imaginative ethos of the story in a manner no image can duplicate.”
Caveat: If you’re intimidated by extreme erudition or inclined to frequent complaint about elitism, there’s every likelihood you’ll not have a very good time with Giraldi. But if you respect erudition and value the sort of adamant, principled elitism Randall Jarrell represented in the previous century, I recommend this book. You will no doubt have quarrels with it, as do I, but isn’t quarreling with a writer you admire one of the pleasures of reading?
April 13, 2019
Midway through his fine piece on James Baldwin, William Giraldi offers perhaps the most explicit articulation of this volume's driving thesis when he writes that "If writers' aesthetics are not moral, if they do not comprehend that style is inextricable from morality, then they're just goofing off on their way to being forgotten." Style as inextricable from morality: though certainly not an idea original to Giraldi, I have nowhere come across a more inspired, inspiring insistence on the deep consequentiality of language, of sentences.
The critical gaze at work in these essays is unflinching and constant, a stringently principled regard lacking all patience for lazy shabbiness of craft. While he does not go so far as to condemn all literature based in identity, à la Harold Bloom's disdain for the "school of resentment" (which generally tends to align in appearance, if not entirely in motive, with those who would prefer to see the continued domination of white/straight/cis/male stories), Giraldi's dismissal of the identity-centered zeitgeist in favor of more ancient standards of excellence is sure to step on some progressive toes, as it did mine. And yet, the force of his argument is utterly compelling, carried not only by the brilliance of his prose, but by the depth and breadth of the canonical voices he arranges into a soaring choir singing the praises of style. Oscar Wilde, Flannery O'Connor, Matthew Arnold, and Baldwin stand among his favorites; Giraldi pulls his own convictions from the themes which echo down from this host of immortal voices.
The strongest pieces here are those which praise, rather than cut down: his eloquent celebrations of the legacies of Bloom, Allan Gurganus, and Harper Lee ring notes much truer and purer than his swipes at Fifty Shades of Grey or MFA programs. And I found myself more engrossed in his essays as they progressed, from general reflections on literature and culture to a series of pieces on fellow critics, and finally to reflections on writers and their books. Excellent literary criticism is a true pleasure to read: when the sentences sing and the analysis joyfully opens up new understandings into the work at hand. This final section provided example after example of what well-formed book reviewing can be, carrying incisive inquiry along a current of really terrific writing.
My own lens on reading, as well as writing, has taken much from this collection. It is thrilling to be challenged by lofty standards of excellence, by an insistence on style as virtue. Giraldi's project would present a worthy and worthwhile challenge to any reader - or for that matter, anyone willing to adopt a more critical posture towards culture and art - and I am grateful to have sat at the feet of such a thinker and reader as Giraldi.
The critical gaze at work in these essays is unflinching and constant, a stringently principled regard lacking all patience for lazy shabbiness of craft. While he does not go so far as to condemn all literature based in identity, à la Harold Bloom's disdain for the "school of resentment" (which generally tends to align in appearance, if not entirely in motive, with those who would prefer to see the continued domination of white/straight/cis/male stories), Giraldi's dismissal of the identity-centered zeitgeist in favor of more ancient standards of excellence is sure to step on some progressive toes, as it did mine. And yet, the force of his argument is utterly compelling, carried not only by the brilliance of his prose, but by the depth and breadth of the canonical voices he arranges into a soaring choir singing the praises of style. Oscar Wilde, Flannery O'Connor, Matthew Arnold, and Baldwin stand among his favorites; Giraldi pulls his own convictions from the themes which echo down from this host of immortal voices.
The strongest pieces here are those which praise, rather than cut down: his eloquent celebrations of the legacies of Bloom, Allan Gurganus, and Harper Lee ring notes much truer and purer than his swipes at Fifty Shades of Grey or MFA programs. And I found myself more engrossed in his essays as they progressed, from general reflections on literature and culture to a series of pieces on fellow critics, and finally to reflections on writers and their books. Excellent literary criticism is a true pleasure to read: when the sentences sing and the analysis joyfully opens up new understandings into the work at hand. This final section provided example after example of what well-formed book reviewing can be, carrying incisive inquiry along a current of really terrific writing.
My own lens on reading, as well as writing, has taken much from this collection. It is thrilling to be challenged by lofty standards of excellence, by an insistence on style as virtue. Giraldi's project would present a worthy and worthwhile challenge to any reader - or for that matter, anyone willing to adopt a more critical posture towards culture and art - and I am grateful to have sat at the feet of such a thinker and reader as Giraldi.
November 20, 2018
This is among the best books I've read (listened to) this year, though not all of it was all interesting to me. It's a collection of Giraldi's very heady, very smart, scholarly, audacious, full-on pretentious essays and reviews on literature.
A word on the pretentious thing. Even I (self-proclaimed lit snob) was put off at times. That said, I wonder if it's vogue-y to call anyone pretentious who asserts one idea over another. Are we okay with arguments against relativism? Well, Giraldi asserts a lot.
But he's very smart.
I actually wrote him an email. (No response.) I became aware of him from his GREAT novel, BUSY MONSTERS. There was another novel, HOLD THE DARK (so-so). And I remember a big controversy among writers when he ripped up another writer in a review.
I have to admit that I was instantly intrigued. I actually have never read the writer he shredded, but I had a new aspiration: get reviewed by William Giraldi. Because I seriously just want to hear what he thinks! I do!
I asked him to blurb my latest novel. Me, no-name Spiegel. He kindly said no.
I started this book and was so blown away by its audaciousness that I asked him if I could just send him my book, no strings attached. Nada. The Big Nothing.
I probably insulted him, though. I said that this book simultaneously made and ruined his career. He might not have liked that.
But, wow. I really respect him, frankly. I like his brazenness, his audacity indeed, his ideas too. I often agree. Not always.
He has one of the best essays on Harper Lee's GO SET A WATCHMAN I've ever heard.
I found his James Franco essay amusing.
I love what he says about James Baldwin.
I disagreed with him on memoir. I like me a good memoir.
I think he's pretty right on about the tate of literature.
And I'll say it again: William Giraldi, a free copy of my book is yours. I'm okay with negative reviews. Though you may freakin' like it.
A word on the pretentious thing. Even I (self-proclaimed lit snob) was put off at times. That said, I wonder if it's vogue-y to call anyone pretentious who asserts one idea over another. Are we okay with arguments against relativism? Well, Giraldi asserts a lot.
But he's very smart.
I actually wrote him an email. (No response.) I became aware of him from his GREAT novel, BUSY MONSTERS. There was another novel, HOLD THE DARK (so-so). And I remember a big controversy among writers when he ripped up another writer in a review.
I have to admit that I was instantly intrigued. I actually have never read the writer he shredded, but I had a new aspiration: get reviewed by William Giraldi. Because I seriously just want to hear what he thinks! I do!
I asked him to blurb my latest novel. Me, no-name Spiegel. He kindly said no.
I started this book and was so blown away by its audaciousness that I asked him if I could just send him my book, no strings attached. Nada. The Big Nothing.
I probably insulted him, though. I said that this book simultaneously made and ruined his career. He might not have liked that.
But, wow. I really respect him, frankly. I like his brazenness, his audacity indeed, his ideas too. I often agree. Not always.
He has one of the best essays on Harper Lee's GO SET A WATCHMAN I've ever heard.
I found his James Franco essay amusing.
I love what he says about James Baldwin.
I disagreed with him on memoir. I like me a good memoir.
I think he's pretty right on about the tate of literature.
And I'll say it again: William Giraldi, a free copy of my book is yours. I'm okay with negative reviews. Though you may freakin' like it.
September 7, 2018
American Audacity is a silver-tongued, deeply imagined collection of essays embracing the cosmos of American Literature. Giraldi's conviction shines when he emphasizes the weighty charge to critics to rise to the meaningful craftsmanship we exalt in writers; he believes analysis should be a beautiful response to beauty itself, should creatively elaborate upon the transcendental statements of art in the most imaginative way. To be an intermediary between art and culture, good criticism is an act of love, in reciprocity to the upwelling consciousness in the best literature that is itself love:
"The critic's chief loyalty is to the duet of beauty and wisdom, to the well made and the usefully wise, and to the ligatures between style and meaning."
The section he devotes to fellow critics—a series of essays where he explores the genius and the mistakenness of a number of luminaries—was edifying and intellectually thrilling.
Highly recommended for those who wish to hear literature's sublime holler to our porous, open-ended, everyday selves—vocalized via the megaphone of plot and language—and to those who want to glory in linguistic vitality and the profound sanity of an excellent essayist's mind. Giraldi's book is a marriage of word and deed—an exceptional take on many topics, containing a challenge to literary standards that is by itself audacious and beautiful.
"The critic's chief loyalty is to the duet of beauty and wisdom, to the well made and the usefully wise, and to the ligatures between style and meaning."
The section he devotes to fellow critics—a series of essays where he explores the genius and the mistakenness of a number of luminaries—was edifying and intellectually thrilling.
Highly recommended for those who wish to hear literature's sublime holler to our porous, open-ended, everyday selves—vocalized via the megaphone of plot and language—and to those who want to glory in linguistic vitality and the profound sanity of an excellent essayist's mind. Giraldi's book is a marriage of word and deed—an exceptional take on many topics, containing a challenge to literary standards that is by itself audacious and beautiful.
January 12, 2022
A comprehensive consideration of American literature’s traditions and themes, authors and critics. Giraldi marries substance (informed opinion) with style (wit, language precision) in his collection of literary essays, showcasing that it is indeed possible to be both intellectually stimulating and accessibly engaging on the page. There are multiple instances where I found myself laughing out loud with glee and revisiting certain phrases with delight. A true pleasure to read someone so connected to and passionate about language.
June 16, 2025
"A life with books is a life of pleasure, yes, but also a life of work. Not just the work of lugging their heft each time you move, but the work of reading them, the work of discernment, of accepting the loquacity of the world’s bliss and hurt and boredom, of welcoming both small and seismic shifts to your selfhood, of attempting to earn those intimations of insight that bring the world briefly into focus."
December 2, 2018
An engaging collection of essays that argue passionately for the importance of literature in American culture.
Giraldi writes: "Tell me what books you read and I will tell you who you are; tell me you read no books and I will tell you there is no you."
Giraldi writes: "Tell me what books you read and I will tell you who you are; tell me you read no books and I will tell you there is no you."
November 20, 2018
Girardi is one of my favorite contemporary essayists and he can sting in the best way. The best essays are near the front, with relatively minor pieces scattered throughout.
November 29, 2018
Dear, sir.
I did not buy your book; I checked it out from the library. You claim that "genteel poverty" no longer exists. You are wrong.
Come visit me sometime.
Mitchell
I did not buy your book; I checked it out from the library. You claim that "genteel poverty" no longer exists. You are wrong.
Come visit me sometime.
Mitchell
February 1, 2019
"We have a moral obligation to be intelligent." Word.
March 5, 2019
Steel yourself for truly exceptional writing, cutting yet spot-on criticism and inspiring essays about authors you have yet to read.
May 30, 2020
His prose is inspiring. Fun to read just based on the sentences alone.
June 13, 2020
Brilliant. In many ways a simple plea to call out bad writing and recognize the good stuff. With self-publishing easy and cheap, a deluge of bad writing is sinking all ships.
January 9, 2024
This volume checks the box for literary criticism, albeit a collection of reheats from mags, notably The New Republic, however while both America and Audacity are present, there is little development of what is presumably meant to the be the collection's theme.
Most of the subject matter concerns Americans, but paddy Oscar Wilde seems to show up constantly, and I think we can omit T.S. Eliot from the list that includes Melville and Whitman.
And there is audacity alright, but I think not as the author meant it. It's pretty audacious to say "I haven't read most of McCarthy" in one chapter, in the very next to declare which of McCarthy's many works is the only one suitable for film. The stark audacity surrounding "Go Set a Watchman" by the nefarious interests that brought it to us is quite well done.
The author wonders, in one or more of the essays, how his fiction can be compared to McCarthy when the answer is obvious to anyone that can read: they both overwrite to the point of nausea. I'd be willing to bet "quotidian" appears at least a dozen times in the volume, and I'm equally willing to bet that "daily" shows up not even once. And is there anything besides the first couple of chapters of Genesis that is not "postlapsarian"? In the same way that too rich a diet upsets the tum, a constant barrage of $3.50 words sours as well. Giraldi was right about Suttree, but failed to detect the plank in his own eye.
The great bulk of the book is the same remarks being made repeatedly in varying contexts, rather like an actor who comes out in different dress and stands before different props but recites the same lines. Those lines are: Literary cannon - good. Internet - bad. Those who have not devoted their career to reading literary cannon - unqualified to have an opinion. Henry James - very good. E.L. James - very bad. Oh yeah, and "I'm kinda like Flannery O'Connor".
The essays on Baldwin and Gurganus show American Audacity; had the book been composed of 20 or so more like these, it would have been a slam dunk. Giraldi went to the trouble of reviewing Prose's Mr. Monkey but missed what is most notable about it (perhaps because it is something that is missing): how close it is to a work that might have been truly memorable.
Most of the subject matter concerns Americans, but paddy Oscar Wilde seems to show up constantly, and I think we can omit T.S. Eliot from the list that includes Melville and Whitman.
And there is audacity alright, but I think not as the author meant it. It's pretty audacious to say "I haven't read most of McCarthy" in one chapter, in the very next to declare which of McCarthy's many works is the only one suitable for film. The stark audacity surrounding "Go Set a Watchman" by the nefarious interests that brought it to us is quite well done.
The author wonders, in one or more of the essays, how his fiction can be compared to McCarthy when the answer is obvious to anyone that can read: they both overwrite to the point of nausea. I'd be willing to bet "quotidian" appears at least a dozen times in the volume, and I'm equally willing to bet that "daily" shows up not even once. And is there anything besides the first couple of chapters of Genesis that is not "postlapsarian"? In the same way that too rich a diet upsets the tum, a constant barrage of $3.50 words sours as well. Giraldi was right about Suttree, but failed to detect the plank in his own eye.
The great bulk of the book is the same remarks being made repeatedly in varying contexts, rather like an actor who comes out in different dress and stands before different props but recites the same lines. Those lines are: Literary cannon - good. Internet - bad. Those who have not devoted their career to reading literary cannon - unqualified to have an opinion. Henry James - very good. E.L. James - very bad. Oh yeah, and "I'm kinda like Flannery O'Connor".
The essays on Baldwin and Gurganus show American Audacity; had the book been composed of 20 or so more like these, it would have been a slam dunk. Giraldi went to the trouble of reviewing Prose's Mr. Monkey but missed what is most notable about it (perhaps because it is something that is missing): how close it is to a work that might have been truly memorable.
October 6, 2018
"Books, like love, make life worth living"
The smartest love story I've ever read. The author's fierce intelligence, passion for literature, and unequivocal audacity ignite nearly every page.
"Tell me the books you read and I'll tell you who you are; tell me you read no books and I'll tell you there is no you." (from "A Single Shade of Grey" in section one - American Moments)
Particularly instructive for me was the way the author continually cites cliches and tautologies that can drain the vitality from any writer's prose. Even his critical and literary heroes - Cynthia Ozick, Harold Bloom, James Baldwin - get carefully scrutinized and held to account when tired formulations appear in their work. I challenge anyone to read this book end-to-end and tell me they're not a smarter reader having done so.
"But there are no bad guys or good guys in literature. There are wrong guys and right guys, guys who write well and guys who don't." (from "Against Dullness" in section two - American Critics)
When exposed to a mind like this, I'm often envious. And though envy is not a healthy response, it frequently motivates me. In this case, I'm motivated to become a more discerning reader and a better writer. If either outcome occurs, I'll have this book and author to thank.
"...knowing what scientists now believe about the protean personality of memory 'I think I remember' is the only accurate way to preface our recollections." (from "Truth To Spirit" in section three - American Stories)
The smartest love story I've ever read. The author's fierce intelligence, passion for literature, and unequivocal audacity ignite nearly every page.
"Tell me the books you read and I'll tell you who you are; tell me you read no books and I'll tell you there is no you." (from "A Single Shade of Grey" in section one - American Moments)
Particularly instructive for me was the way the author continually cites cliches and tautologies that can drain the vitality from any writer's prose. Even his critical and literary heroes - Cynthia Ozick, Harold Bloom, James Baldwin - get carefully scrutinized and held to account when tired formulations appear in their work. I challenge anyone to read this book end-to-end and tell me they're not a smarter reader having done so.
"But there are no bad guys or good guys in literature. There are wrong guys and right guys, guys who write well and guys who don't." (from "Against Dullness" in section two - American Critics)
When exposed to a mind like this, I'm often envious. And though envy is not a healthy response, it frequently motivates me. In this case, I'm motivated to become a more discerning reader and a better writer. If either outcome occurs, I'll have this book and author to thank.
"...knowing what scientists now believe about the protean personality of memory 'I think I remember' is the only accurate way to preface our recollections." (from "Truth To Spirit" in section three - American Stories)
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