Books, Arts & Manners: Midas’ Grandchildren

Run River, by Joan Didion. Obolensky, $4.50

Academic room. Books, freshman compositions, learned journals, the manuscript of a poem fungoid with emendations. The scholar, a Talmudist’s curve in his shoulders, fresh from a classroom of Jünglinger brought up on Marx, Freud, and Spock, where he talked to himself about the morphology of the novel from Richardson to George Eliot (with a toothsome digression on Cumberland’s Henry) also reviews fiction. The finished novel, which he has enjoyed (but as an incurable reader of novels, mind you) lies in his lap. His ear twitches with the annoyance of indecision. Several graduate schools have taught him the significance of great fiction but he had discovered novels for himself before he knew that professors bejeweled this earth, in spite of his grandmother’s opinion that r ding softens the brain. Reader and critic is he both, but inharmoniously. The two daimons converse.

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Guy Davenport

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Run River, by Joan Didion. Obolensky, $4.50

Academic room. Books, freshman compositions, learned journals, the manuscript of a poem fungoid with emendations. The scholar, a Talmudist’s curve in his shoulders, fresh from a classroom of Jünglinger brought up on Marx, Freud, and Spock, where he talked to himself about the morphology of the novel from Richardson to George Eliot (with a toothsome digression on Cumberland’s Henry) also reviews fiction. The finished novel, which he has enjoyed (but as an incurable reader of novels, mind you) lies in his lap. His ear twitches with the annoyance of indecision. Several graduate schools have taught him the significance of great fiction but he had discovered novels for himself before he knew that professors bejeweled this earth, in spite of his grandmother’s opinion that r ding softens the brain. Reader and critic is he both, but inharmoniously. The two daimons converse.