The Sheep from the Goats: Selected Literary Essays of John Simon

Without referring to prevailing theories of schools of thought, New York magazine drama critic and author ( Ingmar Bergman Directs ) Simon, in these 49 entertaining pieces of book chat, tries to impart ``what makes a work or an author sui generis'' and how he rates that ``particular quiddity.'' Widely but mistakenly regarded as mainly a negative critic, Simon brings high standards to bear on American, English, French, Slavic, Italian and Hispanic writers. He praises Randall Jarrell's ``brilliantly and justly destructive reviews,'' Ian Hamilton's biography of Robert Lowell, Stevie Smith's verse, Camus's notebooks and the writings of Grass, Kafka, Kundera and Borges, among others. But acknowledging that ``in a critic, complaining is often necessary where it hurts most,'' he castigates Norman Mailer's ``usual jumble of megalomania, phantasmagoria, marketable paranoia, and unprovable assertions,'' Gore Vidal's ``want of strong, memorable, living characters'' and the limitations of structuralism, semiotics and deconstructionism. He also cannot resist pointing out mistranslations, stylistic infelicities, and grammatical and spelling errors. (Jan.)