American Audacity by William Giraldi 2018

William Giraldi is an essayist, novelist, and literary critic who is the fiction editor of the journal Agni at Boston University.  In this, his fourth book, he shares with the reader his analysis,  interpretation, worry about, and love for American literature.  His detailed comments about individual writers from the well known (Poe, Ozick, Melville, Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Harper Lee, Richard Ford) to several who were new to me (Elizabeth Spencer, Padgett Powell, Daniel Woodrell) are both informative and entertaining.  His enthusiasm is infectious.

He emphatically defends and extols the role of the literary critic, writing in reference to his own approach: “The critic’s chief responsibility is to examine an author’s resources of language and of genres, in a word, to be preoccupied with form.”  With chapters on Trilling, Joseph Epstein, Harold Bloom, Wendy Lesser, James Wolcott, Katie Rophie,  Carl Van Vechten (a particularly interesting exploration of a writer who I knew little of) and Norman Podhoretz ( an absolutely killing review!), Giraldi explores the role and importance of literary commentary in elevating the reader’s realization of the writer’s aspirations.  When combined with the chapters on individual writers, Giraldi has adroitly achieved his goal as stated in the introduction, to write  a “volume of essays and reviews concerned with American authors and with those American subjects I am interested in as an American author myself.”

Lest you are already yawning with memories of middle school English class reading Emerson and Longfellow, think again. Giraldi combines a terrific sense of humor and a cutting wit with an impressive scholarly depth of allusions to entertain as well as inform.  If you enjoy wonderful writing about wonderful writers, this is a great book to dip into from time to time.

Here’s how Nathaniel Rich described Giraldi’s book in his New York Times review of August 16, 2018:  If literature, as William Giraldi writes in “American Audacity,” is “the one religion worth having,” then Giraldi is our most tenacious revivalist preacher, his sermons galvanized by a righteous exhortative energy, a mastery of the sacred texts and — unique in contemporary literary criticism — an enthusiasm for moralizing in defense of high standards. “  At 480 pages, it’s a bit much to read straight through from  cover to cover, but having returned to it this week after beginning to read it in March, I found it to be a literary treat.  Try him.