cover image Against the Grain: The New Criterion on Art and Intellect at the End of the 20th Century

Against the Grain: The New Criterion on Art and Intellect at the End of the 20th Century

. Ivan R. Dee Publisher, $35 (477pp) ISBN 978-1-56663-069-6

It would be a shame if the audience for this collection were confined to New Criterion subscribers. Broadminded readers will find an illuminating perspective in many of the 44 pieces culled from the magazine's past half-dozen years. Not everyone will, or should, like everything in this collection: e.g., Donald Lyon's review of ``Angels in America'' is likely to anger some; Maurice Cowling's consideration of Raymond Williams will be of limited interest to others. In pieces grouped into loose headings like ``The Arts Today'' or ``The Academy in the Age of Political Correctness,'' David Fromkin, John Gross, Donald Kagan, John Simon, Joseph Epstein, New Criterion editors Kimball and Kramer, late publisher Samuel Lipman and others write about the fate of the museum; the Sobol Report on New York state's history and social-studies curricula; T.E. Lawrence; John Corigliano's 1991 opera The Ghosts of Versailles; teaching Henry James; and much more. In these and broader essays, they particularly rail against the pursuit of philosophy without truth; against great lives deprived of their greatness; against visual art abstracted from the object, demonstrating that what is left is often meaningless rhetoric. Occasionally, writers indulge in a bit of bombast themselves (sometimes to undeniably funny effect as in Kimball's discussion of Michel Foucault's fame in American universities ``where hermetic arguments about sex and power are pursued with risible fecklessness by the hirsute and untidy''), but even when one disagrees with their positions, one still has to admire the grace and erudition with which they are presented. (Mar.)