National Book Critics Circle Awards finalists - Criticism

For the past three decades, standard wisdom has held that gays did not identify themselves as homosexual until 1870, when doctors diagnosed them as such. But in this provocative book, Robb argues that gay culture existed long before the medical establishment said so. To hear Robb tell it, doctors actually did more harm than good. Luckily, there were mild treatments, such as one doctor's prescription of "cold baths with outdoor exercise and the study of mathematics." Others prescribed prostitutes. Still, no matter how persistent the oppression, gay life was lived. There were the docks in Barcelona, the Champs-Elysées in Paris, Central Park in New York City, and almost anywhere in Naples. Encoding behavior was not just a necessity but a sport, and the selectivity of this life bred a closeness that made the world seem small. One could hardly pick a better literary sleuth for this world than Robb. His previous biographies were notable for their combination of research and page-turning readability. By John Freeman

Seligman has taken a risky route with his twin portraits of film critic Pauline Kael and all-around woman of letters Susan Sontag. What can one say about them that they didn't utter themselves with more flair? As it turns out, that's not really the point. Rather, Seligman wants to register their impact on his own mind. If you're looking for a major reexamination of their work, search elsewhere. But if you believe that criticism exists between the intersection of sense and sensibility, then "Sontag & Kael" is a fine book. Seligman knew Kael for more than 20 years and so she was clearly the more intimate mentor. Not surprisingly, he goes rather easy on Kael's inconsistencies as a critic. His reaction to Sontag is more complicated, since her persona is seductive to him while her politics are not. "I didn't want to write a book with a hero and a villain," he says, "but Sontag kept making it hard for me." It is a testament to his liveliness that we finish this book wanting to argue back. By John Freeman

If journalism is a first draft of history, book reviews are dispatches from the front lines of literature. A good critic may capture the qualities of an individual book, but for a broader perspective on the art of writing in our times, we must wait for the scholarship of future generations. Or we may read James Wood. To call Wood exemplary as a book critic would be inaccurate, because his writing simply can't be measured against that of other essayists. The 22 eloquent essays reprinted here range in subject from William Shakespeare to Leo Tolstoy to Tom Wolfe. But, impressive as the breadth of material may be, what makes Wood incomparably important as a literary critic is that every piece contributes to an encompassing vision of contemporary literature. This book is chiefly concerned with one facet of that picture: the distinction to be drawn between premodern satire, in which the narrator is "reliably unreliable," and modern tragicomedy, in which the narrator is "unreliably unreliable." By Jonathon Keats

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