In the lost world of belles lettres, these 66 short meditations would have been called "fugitive pieces"—vignettes of encounters with the famous (Pound, Auden, Ellison, Bellow), memoirs of friends and colleagues (usually writers and teachers), book reviews, poems (Stern's and others), playlets and fictions. Prolific novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist and University of Chicago English professor Stern (Golk) offers reflections so readerly that the book contains appreciations of two libraries—a small town one in Indiana and a grand one in Chicago. Stern possesses the qualities he speaks admiringly of in his book reviews: he is "a thoughtful observer," and his work exhibits an "affectionate relationship between the book's intelligence and its readers." But felicitous phrases ("Lutz's shower of lacrimal information") are often buried among redundancies, and engaging wit (Van Blederen's vandalism as a form of "critical genius"), engaged reportage (about tennis), moving eulogies and memorable moments are mingled with flotsam: an unpublished letter to the New York Times, a statement read to university faculty, pro forma tributes. Although most of these pieces were written after 1993, only an interest in Stern lends magnitude to his comments on, for example, Ross Perot or Clarence Thomas, and few of the book reviews that constitute a third of the work here possess timelessness. "I hadn't wanted to write an autobiography," Stern declares, but this miscellany, for all its fluxy attributes, is not really a good substitute. (Oct.)
