Complete Collected Essays, by V. S. Pritchett (Random House, 1,319 pp., $35)
GOOD old-fashioned literary criticism has become an alarmingly scarce commodity of late, making the publication of this book an occasion for rejoicing. Not a trace of literary theory will be found in these 203 pieces, in which Pritchett writes about everybody from Italo Svevo to Mark Twain with wit, grace, and a miraculous knack for pithy phrasemaking. Here, for example, is Pritchett on Evelyn Waugh: “His early books spring from the liberating notion that human beings are mad; the war trilogy, a work of maturity, draws on the meatier notion that the horrible thing about human beings is that they are sane.” Even when Pritchett strays from the mark (he underrates Trollope and overrates Mary McCarthy, in both cases leaving the faint suspicion that politics has knocked off his aim), he is always worth reading, not least because his chief interest is in the rich particularity of authors rather than in mind-clouding general ideas. Weighing in at four pounds, Complete Collected Essays is too bulky for an ideal bedside book; but those able to lift it with ease will find it nicely suited to random perusal at odd hours.
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