Shirley Jackson
Like any conscionable critics, the author is a huge fan of Shirley Jackson. He is also a succinct literary critic. Although his actual consideration of Jackson in general and We Have Always Lived in the Castle specifically expands well beyond this boundary, he manages to sum up her novel one sublime metaphor:
“The story is a frieze disturbed. Merricat has stilled her family, nailed them like a book to a tree, forever to be unread.”
Zelig
The author self-implicates himself as metaphor by describing his place within the literary zeitgeist of post-WWII writing as being equivalent to Woody Allen’s movie character who is literally capable of physically transforming to comfortably fit within any cultural surrounding. If he’s with black jazz musicians, Zelig becomes a black jazz musician; if he’s with Aryan Nazis, he becomes a blond fascist. As such, Zelig has no real defining personality; he is simply another face in the crowd.
Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino is a literary writer who has probably sold more of his novels to other writers than he has to non-writers. Not a big bestseller, he’s never going to compete with Stephen King. But then King probably will never be the recipient of similar praise, despite arguably his most brilliant work actually being title “The Mist.”
“Italo Calvino never wrote a bad book. But his greatness is like a mist cloud, without a single, compassing magnum opus to make a beginner’s entry point, or to shove into the time capsule of posterity.”
Thomas Berger
Thomas Berger sells better than Calvino—at least one of his novels did. But it is not Little Big Man in particular of which the author writes, but the Berger’s unappreciated canon as a whole. His recognition of Berger as one of the America’s greatest living authors at the time he composed the included essay covers the gamut of what makes that so before arriving at a singularly insightful conclusion, framed as metaphor:
“No grace can ever be earned, in Berger’s world, but it does fall like precious rain here and there.”
Plagiarism
The keystone and anchor of the collection is an essay that examines the fragile nature of plagiarism. What is the difference between plagiarizing another’s work and being profoundly influenced by it? The answer is far too complicated to situate here, but a metaphorical realization of why plagiarism is an issue worthy of providing the keystone and anchor to a compendium of unrelated essays is starkly forward in figurative terms:
“Plagiarism and piracy, after all, are the monsters we working artists are taught to dread, as they roam the woods surrounding our tiny preserves of regard and remuneration.”
