BOOKS
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acknowledging the need for one. To say this is not to demand that a
literary critic should invent a philosophy of value. He might begin with
the simplest of recognitions, for example, with the question asked by
Wallace Stevens in defending the illusory "peace" created by "order"
in poetry: " Isn't a freshening of life a thing of consequence?" Kermode
at one point sums up very well the suggested duty of the critic: "The
critical issue, given the perpetual assumption of crisis, is no less than
the justification of the ideas of order."
Reuben A. Brower
OTHER VOICES
GOING TO JERUSALEM. By Jerome Charyn. Viking Press. $4.95.
THOU WORM JACOB. By Mark Mirsky. Macmillan. $4.95.
WHEN SHE WAS GOOD. By Philip Roth. Random House. $5.95.
IN ORBIT. By Wright Morris. New American Library. $3.95.
THE KNIGHTLY QUEST. By Tennessee Williams. New Directions. $5.50.
THE TIME OF FRIENDSHIP. By Paul Bowles. Holt. Rinehart and Winston.
$4.95.
The problem of finding a voice and maintaining it must
always be the concern of any writer who is serious about his work.
In modern literature few first-rate writers have not turned their prob–
lems with style and voice into a subject.
This does not mean that a writer is more p romising or should
be
taken seriously because he publicizes himself or lets us share the crises
of his craft. Talent refuses to oblige us. But when we turn to any new
work of an established novelist, it is his identifiable voice we hear: and
we listen for it instinctively in the young. Allowing for all the necessary
dependency upon their masters, we await the distinctive word or phrase,
the sound of
someone,
his particular intonations, the surprises that go
beyond influence and calculation.
