WRB—Aug. 19, 2026
“effete pseudo-intellectuals”
The Managing Editor related that a lady of his acquaintance implicitly believed everything she read in the Washington Review of Books; and that, by way of curing her credulity, he fabricated a story of a battle between the Russians and Turks, then at war: and “that it might,” he said, “bear internal evidence of its futility, I laid the scene in an island at the conflux of the Boristhenes and the Danube, rivers which run at the distance of a hundred leagues from each other. The lady, however, believed the story, and never forgave the deception, the consequence of which was that I lost an agreeable companion, and she was deprived of an innocent amusement.” And he added, as an extraordinary circumstance, that the Russian ambassador sent in haste to the printer to know . . . whence he had received the intelligence.
Links:
Reviews:
In The New Yorker, Becca Rothfeld reviews the new Rachel Cusk (Life of M: A Novel, August 25) [An Upcoming book today; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—Aug. 5, 2026.]:
In light of her dream of disintegrating the particularities of selfhood into the warm liquid of universality, it is no surprise that Cusk has invented a new sort of novel that is nearly unidentifiable as such. After all, the novel as we know it concerns itself with people bound by the dictates of the social world, not people approximating the point of view of things. In interviews, Cusk has contrasted “seeing the world” in a way that relates to “society” with seeing it in a way that relates to “art,” as if the highest instances of the novelistic art—Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, Henry James’ The Ambassadors, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway—weren’t suffused with social observation. We is so antisocial as to be decidedly anti-novelistic: what results is less like fiction, with its vibrant evocations, than like undergraduate art theory. “Many of the popular painting exhibitions feature abstract art,” We observes. “It is difficult to know what these paintings mean. Their distance from reality seems assured, yet what in that case are they showing? People stand in front of these paintings as though waiting for them to explain themselves. Sometimes, standing in front of paintings such as these, it has seemed possible that we too could become abstract.”
[It’s even worse than undergraduate art theory; I’ve read those sentences on a museum label. —Steve]
In our sister publication on the Cuyahoga, Robert Minto reviews Phillip Lopate’s book about Washington Irving (A Washington Irving Sketch Book: Reflections on an American Writer, August 18) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Aug. 12, 2026.]:
I left Lopate’s attack on Sontag feeling subtly better-disposed toward both of them, but I left this paean to Irving with a sneaking disappointment. Given that Phillip Lopate is eighty-two years old, this might be his final book. His effort to memorialize a writer prepared to be forgotten will not be his own best claim to be remembered. “There was something sad yet heroic,” he writes, “about the way Irving kept pressing on, trying to maximize his slender vein of genius in new ways.” What is he actually saying here? What does this book truly add up to? I have come to see it as a careful line drawn between Lopate and his idol. Their careers have been spent in the service of different ideals. Irving achieved his popularity at the price of “a special brazenness” that Lopate has always refused. If they are both minor writers, that label means something different for each. Lopate has spent a career insisting that the personal is where truth lives, but here at the end of that career he has written his most impersonal book, as if unwilling to claim for himself the kind of durable relevance time has refused Irving.
[In Lopate’s introduction to his selection of Max Beerbohm essays for the NYRB he dwells on the idea of the “minor writer” for a couple pages:
Beerbohm knew himself to be a minor writer . . . What makes Beerbohm an unusual minor writer is his obstinate aiming for that status. He did not fail to become a major writer; he succeeded in becoming a minor one.
He quotes Cynthia Ozick in praise of Beerbohm as a minor writer as well as Joseph Epstein saying “Max Beerbohm was the world’s greatest minor writer.” And part of Beerbohm’s greatness for Lopate is his handling of personality:
Today, when the memoir and the personal essay stand (rightly or wrongly) accused of narcissism and promiscuous sharing of information better left private, it becomes all the more necessary to ponder how Beerbohm performed the delicate operation of displaying so much personality without lapsing into sticky confession.
His readers learned everything about his temperament, how he was likely to respond in any given situation—rigorously self-analytical, he was onto all his idiosyncrasies, tics, and flaws—but next to nothing about his parents, relatives, financial struggles, premarital amours, or wife.
His approach keeps his personality alive for new readers; the specifics of his life are fixed, but in producing a record of his temperament and responses he permits his readers to imagine him alive, experiencing their world alongside them.
In light of Minto’s review, the attraction of all this to Lopate is even more evident. But the theorizing about what it means to be a “minor writer” did not come from Beerbohm; it came from his readers. He just assessed his talents and wrote accordingly. He was not, like Irving, a hack; nor was he, like Lopate, theorizing about the meaning of his talent to the broader literary culture. The former was alien to him, and the latter would have been superfluous. —Steve]
In our sister publication Down Under, Amelia Zhou reviews Brian Castro’s most recent novel (Chinese Postman, 2024):
Why is love postage’s casualty, and why is the concept of postage such a dilemma for Quin? Perennial uncertainties of reciprocation and self-censorship plague his correspondences with Iryna. He “[postpones] sending the email”; “he regretted saying that immediately after sending the email”; and “even though he was hoping for a reply, he didn’t get one.” Likewise, when Quin is on the receiving end, he sometimes won’t bother to reply at all, or admits to “not know[ing] how to respond.” The message that we, as the third party to these “private” correspondences get, is that letters are destined for failure, either because of the sender’s or receiver’s sabotage or because failure is intrinsic to the medium of the letter, even to the idea of communication itself. Yet Quin welcomes the risk, and willingly inhabits the affective potential of the letter’s failure. When Iryna writes to Quin that she wants to “escape [her] life” even after her hometown Kharkiv has been liberated, he echoes her sentiment with respect to his own predicament. But while Iryna is seeking to leave behind the material realities of war, Quin escapes into unbound fancy—into the “limbo of letters, freed from linear time.” Their bubbles stay isolated, not least because Quin is a willing hostage to epistolary suspension.
N.B.:
“Five Arrested in Connection to Stolen Works by Cézanne, Renoir and Matisse, Prosecutors Say”
John Crowley died on Sunday, August 9. R.I.P.
Tommy John died on Saturday, August 15. R.I.P.
Poem:
“On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet” by Dr. Samuel Johnson
Condemned to Hope’s delusive mine,
As on we toil from day to day,
By sudden blasts, or slow decline,
Our social comforts drop away.Well tried through many a varying year,
See Levet to the grave descend;
Officious, innocent, sincere,
Of every friendless name the friend.Yet still he fills Affection’s eye,
Obscurely wise, and coarsely kind;
Nor, lettered Arrogance, deny
Thy praise to merit unrefined.When fainting Nature called for aid,
And hovering Death prepared the blow,
His vigorous remedy displayed
The power of art without the show.In Misery’s darkest cavern known,
His useful care was ever nigh,
Where hopeless Anguish poured his groan,
And lonely Want retired to die.No summons mocked by chill delay,
No petty gain disdained by pride,
The modest wants of every day
The toil of every day supplied.His virtues walked their narrow round,
Nor made a pause, nor left a void;
And sure the Eternal Master found
The single talent well employed.The busy day, the peaceful night,
Unfelt, uncounted, glided by;
His frame was firm, his powers were bright,
Though now his eightieth year was nigh.Then with no throbbing fiery pain,
No cold gradations of decay,
Death broke at once the vital chain,
And freed his soul the nearest way.
[In Paul Fussell’s book on Dr. Johnson (Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing, 1971) (wonderful book; I wrote about it at some length in WRB—Feb. 26, 2025) he says this about the antepenultimate stanza:
What this glance at the Parable of the Talents implies is Johnson’s awareness of the multiplicity of his own talents, which contrast so strikingly with Levet’s single one. What is implied in this stanza is the prayer, “May the Eternal Master find my talents equally well employed.” The poem, as Edward A. Bloom has perceived, is “more about Johnson than Levet.”
Fussell earlier quotes a prayer Johnson wrote while midway through his work on the Dictionary:
O God, who hast hitherto supported me, enable me so to proceed in this labor and in the whole task of my present state that when I shall render up at the last day an account of the talent committed to me, I may receive pardon for the sake of Jesus Christ. Amen.
What comes through in the elegy is almost a longing for a life and death like Levet’s; although Johnson is aware of Levet’s flaws, the poem portrays a man who goes about his work without the endless neuroticism and self-scrutiny that so troubled Johnson for his entire life.
(I do like that Johnson wrote an elegy that says as much about the poet as about the man who died. Retract your criticism of “Lycidas,” I say!) —Steve]
Upcoming books:
New Directions | August 25
Fortress Besieged: A Novel
by Qian Zhongshu, translated from the Chinese by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao
From the publisher: Set on the eve of the Sino-Japanese war, Fortress Besieged recounts the exuberant misadventures of its hapless hero Fang Hung-chien. After aimlessly studying in Europe at his family’s expense, Fang returns to Shanghai armed with a bogus degree from a fake university. On the ocean liner back, Fang’s life becomes deeply entangled with those of two Chinese beauties—Miss Su and Miss Pao. Qian writes, “With Miss Pao it wasn’t a matter of heart or soul. She hadn’t any change of heart, since she didn’t have a heart.” When he does finally make it home, he obtains a teaching post at a newly established university, encounters effete pseudo-intellectuals, and falls into a disastrous marriage of Nabokovian heights of distress and absurdity. A glorious tale of calamity, disillusionment, love, war, and wedded unbliss, Fortress Besieged was acclaimed by C. T. Hsia as “the most delightful and carefully wrought novel in modern Chinese literature.”
[We linked to a review in WRB—May 6, 2026.]
Also out Tuesday:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: Life of M: A Novel by Rachel Cusk [We linked to a review above and in WRB—Aug. 5, 2026.]
New Directions: The Narrow Road of Oku by Matsuo Bashō, translated from the Japanese by Meredith McKinney
Seven Stories Press: The Eighth Wonder: A Novel by Vlady Kociancich, translated from the Spanish by Jessica Sequeira
Wesleyan University Press: A Levant Journal by George Seferis, translated from the Greek by Roderick Beaton
Sadder than Water: New & Selected Poems by Samih Al-Qasim, translated from the Arabic by Nazih Kassis
What we’re reading:
Steve finished Martin Amis’ The Second Plane (2008) and then read his Lionel Asbo: State of England (2012).
Critical notes:
Alan Jacobs on why John Ruskin should have been horsewhipped:
The indulgence of Ruskin’s parents, and the catechism with which they instructed him—You are a great genius, and it is our duty to nurture that genius—, ought to be interesting to anyone compelled by Ruskin’s writings, because they have everything to do with what is great in his work, and, equally, with what is frustrating about it. For Ruskin learned at an early age to trust his instincts implicitly, to believe that his every flight of imagination winged its way unerringly to some previously unseen truth. This made him a disastrous husband; in his work the results were mixed. In situations in which almost every other writer would wonder whether he was going too far, or making a claim too bold to be defended, Ruskin never had second thoughts. Indeed, “First thought, best thought” could have been his motto.
Adam Roberts on Tennyson’s “Ulysses”:
Arthur D. Ward is puzzled that Tennyson’s Ulysses talks of finding Achilles in Elysion, since “his crew had already seen the great Achilles and had spoken with him, not in the Happy Isles, but at the edge of Hades . . . why remind them of a gruesome meeting in the land where sailors go after the gulfs have washed them down?” Ward thinks that Tennyson is painting Ulysses here as confused: “the confusion is Ulysses’, not Tennyson’s . . . indicative of Ulysses’ indifference to the afterlife that he confuses Hades, the Homeric ‘hell,’ with Elysion, the Homeric ‘heaven.’” But this is surely not right. Ward forgets that this crew, whom Ulysses is mustering with his speech, is not the same as the crew with which he sailed from Troy—they all died, and though Homer’s Odysseus tells the Phaeaceans about the gloomy encounter with dead-Achilles there’s no reason to believe that he also told the Ithacans. Rather we can take this as Ulysses doing an Erik the Red: “sail with me to this new land of miraculous fertility and warmth I have named Greenland! You won’t believe how warm and fertile and above all how green it is!” Ulysses is floating the beguiling possibility for them that if they join him on this voyage they might reach the Happy Isles. It’s true he also notes that they might drown, “it may be that the gulfs will wash us down,” but this is a well-known rhetorical strategy, as with Churchill’s “nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat”: if you are trying to persuade people to do something they know to be dangerous, flatly denying the danger will bounce them out of your persuasiveness. Better to acknowledge the danger whilst balancing it with the greater possibilities of glory. I don’t know anyone who thinks that the crew being addressed in this poem turn Odysseus down: clearly they go with him, after the poem is over.
[Always important to remember that Odysseus is a lying liar who lies. That’s his whole thing. —Steve]
Bee escapes bonnet: there’s a dismaying trend in criticism now—armchair sociology, favoring button-pushing how-“we”-live-now movies like The Drama (2026) and The Invite (2026), and ignoring aesthetics; it reflects a writerly-editorial preference for culture, i.e., not art but the arts as news—
Criticism is haunted by one fear above all, the charge of frivolity; thus critics strain self-defeatingly for importance rather than proving the importance of aesthetics by way of criticism itself.
[A friend of mine recently said to me that “the classical romcom had something to say about love, and the modern romcom has something to say about Nora Ephron movies.” It’s easier to say something about Nora Ephron movies than about love because Nora Ephron movies are less complicated, less interesting, and less important. And this lowering of sights lets artists pretend to be critics, and, as critics haunted by the charge of frivolity, they make Serious Social Commentary in lieu of, and not in conjunction with, art. (Not that this is new; one reason Nora Ephron movies aren’t good is their putting commentary on how “we” live now over commentary on love.) As the Rothfeld piece linked at the top of today’s newsletter says, if you have some idea of what you’re doing you can make the two go together.
But the bigger problem here is a broader abnegation of authority. Writing about important subjects, in hopes that some of the importance rubs off, is a poor substitute for writing with authority. This is a hobbyhorse of mine; in lieu of repeating myself I’ll link to past discussion of it in here and to the piece by BDM that serves as my touchstone. —Steve]
In the New York Times, Matt Dinan on teaching:
Keeping a certain youthful enthusiasm or undergraduate idiosyncrasy is difficult when you’re contending with day care colds, spirit-rending administrative work, worries about the state of the world and the future or simply the kind of routinized structures that bear the weight of bourgeois life. Being a good teacher requires being sort of odd, even a bit immature. Some of my favorite professors married scholarly expertise with considerable eccentricity. My dissertation adviser insisted her students take up social dance like polka, line dancing and zydeco; another of my former professors would alight at 4 a.m. to teach himself Japanese before undertaking woodworking projects like making a life-size chess set. The passions are nonconformist. To be moved is to be a little bit weird.
What I discovered anew in my encounter with The Brothers Karamazov last term was that if you want students to be passionately engaged, not worried about the future, grasping, careerist or disengaged, you must transmit the spark of passion in your deeds, your mien—let’s face it, in your own soul. If you expect your students to choose books, ideas and genuine learning over shortcuts and distraction, you must be a bit courageous, too. Return to the basics. Cut through the haze of abstraction, the webs of scholarly terminology, the pretense of professionalization, and attempt to recover the basic human experiences that can move us. Remain a student in earnest.
[I wrote at some length about the teachers most important to me in WRB—Feb. 11, 2026. (One of my favorite editorial notes in WRB history, if I do say so myself.) And while I, possessed as I am of a BA from a football school in the Midwest, hold myself at a certain distance from the latest in “whither academia?” (the period immediately after the Second World War was an aberration and not coming back, that’s whither), anyone who wants to write—anyone who wants to think—anyone who wants to do anything, really—has to reckon with the question of teaching. To pass something on requires an interchange between someone who knows it and someone who is learning it. What that interchange looks like depends on the subject and on the medium; but it is always, in some form, there.
To read this essay, though, is to be confronted with how completely we have forgotten. This is no critique of Dinan; teaching, after all, has to take into account what the students (the readers, in this case) already know. And to write an essay in the New York Times dedicated to the proposition “you must transmit the spark of passion in your deeds, your mien—let’s face it, in your own soul” is to have concluded that the readers of the New York Times have no idea how to answer such questions as: what is education? What is its purpose? How is it done? It’s not their fault. Nobody ever taught them, and how could they possibly believe in something of which they have not heard, let alone experienced?
Perhaps the overarching trend of my time being cognizant of the world—or perhaps this is merely what it means to become cognizant of the world—is that many institutions whose actual justification (whatever they may have told themselves) for continuing to exist was inertia are now finding that inertia won’t cut it. And they tend not to find themselves up to the challenge; existing out of inertia means you became weak and flabby. Meeting the moment demands that they rearticulate the fundamentals to the world, but even before that to themselves. If you don’t know what your purpose is, you’re not going to convince anyone else of it. —Steve]