Books in Brief

The Aspect of Eternity, by Bruce Bawer (Graywolf, 336 pp., $25)

IN THIS collection of essays first published in The New Criterion, Bruce Bawer often seems to judge writers not just as artists but as people. For Bawer, literature has an unavoidable moral mission—rendering truths about our unavoidably moral world—and a writer who is self-absorbed or lacks a moral vision is likely to stumble in his art. As he writes about Harold Brodkey (who announced in The New Yorker recently that he has AIDS), “One should not be surprised when an egocentric writer who is preoccupied with his own supposed genius . . . produces hundreds of pages of jagged, vainglorious, even infantile prose.” On the other hand, the successful writer—one who can both surrender to and wrest meaning from reality—is touched by a sort of grace. Given Bawer’s eternal concerns, it’s no surprise to learn in his preface that, a “thoroughgoing atheist” when he wrote these pieces, he now looks back at them from “the other side of baptism.” Indeed, his finely crafted essays—each picking out a thread that runs through the works of a twentieth-century writer—display the same measured sensibility and subtle moral sense he demands from novelists. But a critic has an easier time of it than the artist who must both tame and tap his personal demons. Bawer’s forthcoming book dealing with his homosexuality may be a better indication of whether he can live up to his own rigorous—and admirable—standards.

The Aspect of Eternity, by Bruce Bawer (Graywolf, 336 pp., $25)

IN THIS collection of essays first published in The New Criterion, Bruce Bawer often seems to judge writers not just as artists but as people. For Bawer, literature has an unavoidable moral mission—rendering truths about our unavoidably moral world—and a writer who is self-absorbed or lacks a moral vision is likely to stumble in his art. As he writes about Harold Brodkey (who announced in The New Yorker recently that he has AIDS), “One should not be surprised when an egocentric writer who is preoccupied with his own supposed genius . . . produces hundreds of pages of jagged, vainglorious, even infantile prose.” On the other hand, the successful writer—one who can both surrender to and wrest meaning from reality—is touched by a sort of grace. Given Bawer’s eternal concerns, it’s no surprise to learn in his preface that, a “thoroughgoing atheist” when he wrote these pieces, he now looks back at them from “the other side of baptism.” Indeed, his finely crafted essays—each picking out a thread that runs through the works of a twentieth-century writer—display the same measured sensibility and subtle moral sense he demands from novelists. But a critic has an easier time of it than the artist who must both tame and tap his personal demons. Bawer’s forthcoming book dealing with his homosexuality may be a better indication of whether he can live up to his own rigorous—and admirable—standards.