Hitting All the Notes

Ted Solotaroff was at different times editor at Commentary, Book Week of the World Journal Tribune, and HarperCollins—his most impressive achievement the founding of the New American Review that became the American Review. Ian McEwan rightly speaks of him as "the most influential editor of his time." With his keen eye for new talent Solotaroff discovered, introduced, and nurtured writers who went on to have distinguished careers. The list of authors he edited reads like a Who's Who in American writing: Max Apple, Russell Banks, John Hawkes, Norman Mailer, Bobbie Ann Mason, Philip Roth, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, and Sue Miller among many others.

In his introduction to Solotaroff's latest volume of essays, Banks pays tribute to his gift for combining encouragement with incisive criticism. Solotaroff praised one of his novels for a story well told, but thought there was something missing. He could "publish it as it is," but he told him to go home and think about it. Banks took the advice seriously, because "Ted was the best reader of fiction I knew." And, sure enough, Banks came to realize what was missing and as a result produced a better book.

What makes Solotaroff "the best reader of fiction"? I would begin with his generosity of spirit, a generosity that extends to undervalued writers such as Meyer Liben. Unlike the egos of many critics, his writerly ego never displays itself at the expense of the work that he is reviewing. His essays are "powered by affection," not aggression, but never at the cost of compromising critical judgment. A writer of memorable memoirs as well as criticism, he possesses a writer's intimacy with the struggles and achievements of other writers. His own prose, at once warm and luminous, registers the mind and heartbeat and texture of the prose of writers as different as Carver and Munro, Bellow and Fowles. "Teach the free man how to praise"—Solotaroff is the rare critic who has absorbed Auden's lesson. Some essays provide the pleasures of narrative art. (About how many critics can this be said?) The superb essay on Raymond Carver begins with Solotaroff's moving account of his friendship with the writer and his death, followed by a confession of reservations about the work only to be overcome by his realization of what he had missed in a more attentive reading of the stories. "At first it took a literary form, a fascination with the exactness of the writing—common language that 'hit all the notes' as Carver once put it, and with the subtle variations of the emotional burden that I read too glibly as an obsessive gray doom that fogged his people's world. What I had taken to be a grim reductiveness was, when seen over the long haul, a finely calibrated ruefulness: a more tender and interesting and philosophical kind of understanding."

Isaac Rosenfeld (one of Solotaroff's heroes) once spoke enviously of his friend Saul Bellow's gift for figurative language. Solotaroff too has the gift for metaphor, as in the phrase "an obsessive gray doom that fogged his people's world." Or as in this sentence in his essay on Alice Munro: "The first-rate story tellers all have something of the safe cracker in them, since they have to get in and get out, having sprung the combination of a novel's worth of rich material." The metaphor, which has within it an analytic component, is Solotaroff's way of getting at the quick of a writer's achievement. What he says in an essay about Alfred Kazin could be said about himself: "one who writes about writers as gifted novelists and poets do: that quick assessment of the author's character and the work's texture—the life or lack of it, on the page—and the ability to put a hand into the prose or verse and measure the strength of the current."

The combination of roles he has performed (editor, writer, critic, teacher) makes him uniquely qualified to...