The Critics Bear It Away: American Fiction and the Academy

In this collection of book reviews and review-essays, many of which first appeared in the New York Review of Books , Crews examines how, through excess methodological zeal, critics have mistreated the works and literary reputations of American novelists. The author, a professor of English at the University of California,Berkeley, exposed earlier critical follies in The Pooh Perplex ; in the first essay here, he confesses to his own too-strict adherence to Freudian criticism applied to Hawthorne in his previous book The Sins of the Fathers. The collection looks at how Twain, Hemingway, Faulkner, O'Connor and Updike have fared at the hands of critics wielding New Critical, poststructuralist, Marxist, formalist, conservative, liberal, psychoanalytic and/or politically correct agendas. Crews handles these academic battles with a light touch, eschewing jargon in order to introduce general readers to contemporary literary-critical issues. His liberal/pluralist orientation--``I want keen debate, not reverence for great books''--doesn't prevent him from exposing the illusions of Right and Left alike, or from debunking any approach that treats literary works as mere grist for critical mills. (Aug.)