Sea Battles on Dry Land

The late writer best known for his fiction (First Love and Other Sorrows) demonstrates in this provocative, if somewhat uneven, collection of essays an impressive range, examining subjects as diverse as the Western literary canon, American fascism and Carol Burnet. Brodkey's style--at once conversational, confessional and scholarly--proves flexible enough to accommodate his diverse subjects. Particularly rewarding are his forays into literary criticism, an art he practices with rigor, precision and a striking seriousness of purpose, employing mercifully little jargon. ""Jane Austen vs. Henry James,"" notwithstanding its flippant title, presents a convincing and elegantly argued case for the superiority of Austen, while his meditation on John O'Hara, ""The Roar of the Canon,"" showcases an ability to discriminate between fluff and substance in other writers' claims to greatness. The shorter pieces in the collection, which appeared as ""Talk of the Town"" items in the New Yorker, are often unsatisfying, and several of the essays are unqualified disasters (in ""The Woody Allen Mess,"" for example, Brodkey awkwardly ties reflections on his, and his fictional character Wiley Silenowicz's, status as adopted children with musings on celebrity culture). But these pieces show just how talented and careful a writer and critic Brodkey was, and how versatile the essay can be in such capable hands. (Apr.)