Books, Arts & Manners: Digging for Troy

The Sheep from the Goats: Selected Literary Essays, by John Simon (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 453 pp., $24.95)

Great book reviewers have always been rare, but never so rare as in the present age. In the heroic age of reviewing (the nineteenth century), learned men belabored incompetent authors with a vigor that is almost unknown today, when readers of the New York Times must make do with Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who day after day displays the most amazing range of ignorance. Over at The New York Review of Books, Robert Towers is better-read, but he has the power to make any novel sound duller than it could possibly be. Still, Towers does know his job. He knows how to puff a book for Random House or Viking, while at the same time showing his contempt: he’s like a mosquito that can sting and drool at the same time. Then there is John Simon.

TF

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Thomas Fleming

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The Sheep from the Goats: Selected Literary Essays, by John Simon (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 453 pp., $24.95)

Great book reviewers have always been rare, but never so rare as in the present age. In the heroic age of reviewing (the nineteenth century), learned men belabored incompetent authors with a vigor that is almost unknown today, when readers of the New York Times must make do with Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who day after day displays the most amazing range of ignorance. Over at The New York Review of Books, Robert Towers is better-read, but he has the power to make any novel sound duller than it could possibly be. Still, Towers does know his job. He knows how to puff a book for Random House or Viking, while at the same time showing his contempt: he’s like a mosquito that can sting and drool at the same time. Then there is John Simon.