Synopses & Reviews
Facing the question of fiction becomes, for Paul West, a matter of facing the question of creation and its double, destruction, and of taking sightings from cosmic to microscopic distances without ever leaving the human dimension. In this third gathering of essays on the novelist's art as practiced throughout the twentieth century, West enlarges upon his defense of fiction-taen-to-extremes, offering as final proof the extremes to which life itself takes us. Consideration of the works of some thirty-five novelists and cosmopolitan authors governs the horizon line of Sheer Fiction III from Abish, Alvarez, Barth, Beckett, and Genet, to Moorcock, Mann, Kundera, Vollmann and Weil but there obtrudes a measured yet insistent pall from the horrors of violence. Himself the author of three novels fixated upon World Wars, West is obliged to include essays and reviews of non-fiction works to test the validity of expressionism, or even self-expression, against the mind-numbing, imagination-beggaring insanity of war. "In my own novels," he remarks, "I show what it is like to be someone. I plumb the opacity of identity, concerned most of all with emotions that people find ineffable; and this, in the best style available to me. I try to relate to the magic and mystery of living, amid which we toil in spellbound aversion. With almost incredulous horror, I watch the presence among us of evil, day in, day out." Fiction, as he shows, is one of our necessary means of coping profoundly, and throughout these essays of human depths and shallows, West deploys the exceptional intelligence, wit and style for which he is justly famous.
Review
"Difficult, acerbic at times, and sometimes just plain grouchy, West's penetrating essays command both attention and admiration without begging concurrence." Booklist
Review
"West is a literary and cultural critic of extraordinary skill....In an essay entitled 'Judge Not,' West writes, 'All I ask for is excellence.' That he certainly has." Library Journal