Critic's Notebook

Howe ( World of Our Fathers ), who died in 1993, wrote frequently about literature in Dissent , the left-wing journal he edited for many years. Although several of the essays assembled here, written late in Howe's life, have been published previously, most are newly gathered by his son. The younger Howe explains that his father considered them ``shtiklakh''--a Yiddish word meaning brief idiosyncratic critical reflections, with an ``allusive, darting lucidity.'' The pieces demonstrate Howe's love of good writing and his belief in the importance of the ``common reader,'' in his view the mainstay of the literary public outside of academia. In these well written and enlightening essays, Howe concerns himself with the development of character in fiction, and with stylistic variation in the works of Tolstoy, Woolf, Flaubert and Nabokov. He constantly dissociates himself from literary theory, which he considered elitist and insular. This diverse posthumous collection will appeal to serious readers. (Sept.)