The Fate of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, Appraisals

The 12 literary essays collected in this volume are bottomless wells of provocation and insight. In each, Boyers (founding editor of the journal Salmagundi) scrutinizes a thematically broad topic from a variety of angles and approaches. He begins “Authority” from a sociopolitical perspective before segueing into an appreciation of Susan Sontag’s confident authority as a cultural critic. In “Fidelity,” he explores the topic in contexts ranging from marriage to the student-teacher relationship. Several essays on widely divergent ideas resonate harmoniously with one another, notably “Reading from the Life,” in which Boyers discusses several celebrated authors who embraced opposing values in their life and art, and “Saving Beauty,” about his ambivalence toward a friend who’s a charming, attractive serial philanderer. Boyers skillfully grounds philosophically heady topics in understandable everyday realities, as in “The Sublime,” which at one point he senses as the “outsize sentiment” he feels for “things Italian,” despite his frustration with the country’s inefficient bureaucracy. He is also adept at encapsulating an idea in a well-turned phrase, as in his observation that “we admire beauty, in works of art especially, because they embody a successful mastery of everything that says no or impossible to every effort at an ideal, unimpeachable sufficiency.” Readers who crave rich food for thought will find much to savor in this volume. [em](Sept.) [/em]