Books in Brief: Minor Monuments

Minor Monuments: Selected Essays, by Howard Moss (Ecco Press, 336 pp., $20)

Of the critical pieces assembled here—work ranging in time from the late 1950s to 1985—Moss, poetry editor for The New Yorker and a distinguished poet himself, writes in the Preface, “they are all forays into alien territory, into the terra incognita of prose, and each was, for me … a struggle to master the demands of fact, coherence, and style.” But mastered them he has, and in poised and pointed prose. In “Notes on Fiction,” for instance, the poet writes: “There’s a certain point in every novel where one wants to know what everyone had for dinner. Tolstoy is very good on this score, James very bad. There are no bathrooms or kitchens in The Wings of the Dove or The Golden Bowl (though there is a famous omelette in The Ambassadors). Proust offers us a kitchen, a latrine, and brothel.” No less inviting are the author’s evaluations of Katherine Anne Porter, Anton Chekhov, and Eudora Welty, to name just a few. And an added treat in this impeccable collection is its gathering of four essays that have never before been collected: an essay on Flaubert; a review of Chekhov’s early stories; another of Elizabeth Bishop’s fiction; and an essay on Eileen Simpson’s Poets in Their Youth.

RS

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Rodney Stevens

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Minor Monuments: Selected Essays, by Howard Moss (Ecco Press, 336 pp., $20)

Of the critical pieces assembled here—work ranging in time from the late 1950s to 1985—Moss, poetry editor for The New Yorker and a distinguished poet himself, writes in the Preface, “they are all forays into alien territory, into the terra incognita of prose, and each was, for me … a struggle to master the demands of fact, coherence, and style.” But mastered them he has, and in poised and pointed prose. In “Notes on Fiction,” for instance, the poet writes: “There’s a certain point in every novel where one wants to know what everyone had for dinner. Tolstoy is very good on this score, James very bad. There are no bathrooms or kitchens in The Wings of the Dove or The Golden Bowl (though there is a famous omelette in The Ambassadors). Proust offers us a kitchen, a latrine, and brothel.” No less inviting are the author’s evaluations of Katherine Anne Porter, Anton Chekhov, and Eudora Welty, to name just a few. And an added treat in this impeccable collection is its gathering of four essays that have never before been collected: an essay on Flaubert; a review of Chekhov’s early stories; another of Elizabeth Bishop’s fiction; and an essay on Eileen Simpson’s Poets in Their Youth.