The Story about the Story: Great Writers Explore Great Literature (review)

I recently taught a freshman composition class that I called “Reading as Writers, Writing as Readers.” Instead of textbook models of what English papers should look like, I urged my students to read what published authors wrote about one another, and I sent them to the library to compile their own bibliographies of “books about books.” They were creative researchers, but I wouldn’t have faulted them for taking a shortcut through the Library of Congress subject heading “Authors—Books and reading,” which offers up Sven Birkerts’s Reading Life (on my syllabus), Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer (on my desk), and about fifteen hundred other volumes, including the new anthology The Story about the Story: Great Writers Explore Great Literature (which would have satisfied the assignment nicely).

Editor J. C. Hallman (a contemporary writer of fiction and nonfiction, whose story collection The Hospital for Bad Poets was published by Milkweed Editions in May) aims to intervene in the “decades-long pissing match between creative writers and critics.” His introduction is a deftly composed trip through some of the uglier literary turf battles of the twentieth century—particularly between ghoulish high theorists and authors, who fought back as violently as the undead in any George Romero movie. But Hallman’s ideal solution is not the decimation of either side, but a “fusion” in the name of “creative criticism.”

“Is beauty that has been made out of words impervious to other words?” Sven Birkerts asks in an essay included here, “On a Stanza by John Keats,” and the answer implied in Hallman’s anthology is a resounding “no.” The Story about the Story is a stealth campaign for criticism—for reading re-created on the page—as an art form. What is consistent across every piece in the anthology is a dogged respect for language and prose that gestures toward the sublime. “As we read,” William H. Gass writes, “we find ourselves companions to a landscape or a dog, a shattered marriage, broken street, a doctor, brother, drunkard, deep ravine . . . and in that sense our meeting with the text can seem quite seamless.”

Birkerts and Gass are natural narrators of reading as personal experience. Other contributors to The Story work the outside of the literary carnival that Hallman is staging. Charles D’Ambrosio’s piece about The Catcher in the Rye is an essay about suicide, with Salinger as source rather than muse. Dagoberto Gilb’s, Salman Rushdie’s, and David Lodge’s contributions are essentially childhood memoirs. There isn’t a shade of the first person in James Woods’s “What Chekhov Meant by Life.” Virginia Woolf is a bit more present—she always is, in her prose style, her punctuation—but she is as much a critic as those she critiques in “An Essay in Criticism.”

Hallman’s stylistically diverse selections could be broadly defined as “review essays” or “literary essays.” Sara Levine has argued, “Some essays move very close to the short story in which the narrator himself is the protagonist. Other essays are personal simply because they move in unconventional ways,” and Hallman is wise enough to recognize that all “creative criticism” need not follow the refreshing-personal-anecdote-followed-by-critical-inquiry formula (though that’s the formula of this review). Still, you do occasionally wonder what—other than being magnificently well-read—the authors in this anthology have in common. Hallman could have grouped the material into sections on particular authors: Birkerts along with Seamus Heaney, Czeslaw Milosz, Randall Jarrell, Edward Hirsch, and Robert Hass offering graceful close readings of various stanzas by various poets; D’Ambrosio and Walter Kirn on Salinger; Woolf and Fred Setterberg on Hemingway; Susan Sontag and Herman Hesse on Dostoyevsky; Alain de Botton and Phyllis Rose on Proust.

A section on “The Story about the Whale” would have been particularly captivating. Albert Camus is one of the most generous readers in the book, writing of Melville...