Sight-Readings: American Fictions

It is only in a country where newness and change and brevity of tenure are the common substance of life," wrote Henry James, "that the fact of one's ancestors having lived for a hundred and seventy years in a single spot would become an element of one's morality." Newness and rootedness are the twin poles of Sight-Readings, Elizabeth Hardwick's brilliant new collection of essays. (Her first, Seduction and Betrayal, was nominated for the National Book Award.) Hardwick's focus here is on American writers, at home and abroad, and especially women, as writers and as characters: Edith Wharton, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Katherine Anne Porter, and Joan Didion, among others.
????????In sections on Old New York, Americans Abroad, and Fictions of America, Hardwick considers writers and their landscapes, real and imagined. Her essays on Edith Wharton and Henry James illuminate aspects of their inventions of New York. From there she takes us to the Paris of Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes, into the hermetic world of Boston Transcendentalism, and on to the suburbs of John Cheever, the America of Philip Roth and John Updike, and the restless expanses of Richard Ford and the Prairie poets.
????????Elizabeth Hardwick has achieved a permanent place in American letters for her sharp and elegant criticism. Her essays on American writers are them-selves a work of literature.

Although Elizabeth Hardwick is the author of two highly praised novels--one of them, Sleepless Nights, a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award--she is primarily known as a critic. Yet that word, with its contemporary whiff of consumer advocacy, doesn't quite fit the bill either. Hardwick never practices the literary equivalent of quality control, never bestows her stamp of approval on the likes of Henry James or Elizabeth Bishop. Instead she creates brilliant, unpredictable narratives, in which books and their authors are the main characters.

In Sight-Readings, her fourth collection of essays, Hardwick trains her superbly idiosyncratic eye on a procession of American writers. Rolling out the red carpet for Henry James, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Margaret Fuller, or Richard Ford, she dares us not to read her pick hits. Of course, this wittiest of critics is willing to administer the occasional cudgel, decrying the nonstop fornication in John Updike's novels or the "infernal indiscretion" of Vachel Lindsay's poetry. But even her most acerbic pronouncements, like this one about incessant word-tinkerer Gertrude Stein, tell us something valuable: "When she is not tinkering, we can see her like a peasant assaulting the chicken for Sunday dinner. She would wring the neck of her words." And Hardwick's digressions are invariably gifts, essayistic windfalls. Discussing Edith Wharton's rather tony vision of Manhattan, for example, she writes: "New York, with its statistical sensationalism, is a shallow vessel for memory since it lives in a continuous present, making it difficult to recall the shape of the loss deplored, whether it be the gray tin of the newsstand or the narrow closet for the neighborhood's dry cleaning, there and gone over a vacation." As a summation of the city's self-perpetuating amnesia, you couldn't do better than that. It should be emblazoned, in tiny letters, on the back of each and every subway token. --James Marcus