The Questions That Matter Most: Reading, Writing, and the Exercise of Freedom

In this sharp compendium, Pulitzer Prize winner Smiley (A Dangerous Business) brings together her literary criticism, which brims with the same keen observations, inquisitiveness, and humor as her novels. The selections contemplate canonical works of English and American literature, as in “I Am Your ‘Prudent Amy,’ ” where Smiley suggests that though readers often find Little Women’s Amy March to be vain and spoiled, “she actually possesses the self-awareness and reflectiveness that will help her navigate her world.” Lamenting that Charles Dickens’s journalism is unjustly overlooked, she contends that it’s full of the same “transcendent mastery of all the richnesses of the English language” that distinguishes his novels. She’s less laudatory about some of her other subjects, eviscerating The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for failing to square youthful adventure with the serious moral themes surrounding Jim’s quest for freedom. Smiley even sneaks in some fiction, imagining a happy ending for the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and what advice Princess Marguerite de Navarre of France might have given Othello’s Desdemona (“I read with alarm that you are accompanying your husband on his campaign. Please have a care in this”). Smiley makes for great company, and her unpretentious style will appeal even to those whose eyes glaze over at the thought of revisiting these high school classics. Fleet-footed and smart, this delights. (June)