I'm about a third of a way through Clive James' book. It's an enjoyable enough read, but I doubt if much of it will stick with me because the sad fact is, James is more of a comic than a critic. It's one thing to dismiss a Benjamin or a Sartre if you understand what they had to say and still reject 'em. Lots of literary figures and philosophers deserve a good a hiding. Dismissing them without understanding, on the other hand, is just a cheap way of ingratiating yourself with readers who don't understand either and will be happy to learn that the writers who mystify them are frauds.

I have to agree with hexis.

As a critic, it seems that James is battling the most widely disseminated argument of French literary theory, that the author exists in the text rather than the biography. James is rolling back the clock on critics like Barthes who took their egos and identities out of the work and made loverly bedfellows of high and low many times over. He expressly takes on the act of close reading in his essay on Georg Christoph Lichtenberg.

The pull quotes and other reviews suggest one is in the presence of a truly towering intellect instead of an excellent writer who is well and widely read. There is something disconcertingly narrow about slamming Benjamin (ignoring the proto post-modernism of The Arcades Project) in a book containing a self congratulatory reference to one's own 'premature post-modernism'. James allows himself the amnesiac symptom of forgetting reading and privileging text are equally important hallmarks of critical postmodernity.

He gives the impression it is not fashionable to smart, but smart to be unfashionable.

Having not read the book, but the many excerpts posted on Slate (hyperlinked in my signature) -- I can't help but notice the lack of any substantial criticism of visual art. In a book that purports to be about history and the arts, his 'wide net' has a huge hole in it. Aporia, I think the theorists call it. Given James' appreciation of the cinema and its players, it seems he is just one more student abusing Benjamin's "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" without acknowledging how that theory lends its aura to his own criticism. High hat, indeed.

What is most interesting about the author and his writing(word quilting, more than smithing) is the choice to reposition biography at the center of the act of crtiticsm and place it in a cultural context with very little if any any examination of actual work. When he examines work instead of life, he skips over salient elements that could produce an effective act of criticism. A curious performace of polemic.

How much more compelling would his thoughts on torture in Terry Gilliam's Brazil be if placed alongside its simultaneous representations of terrorism and surveillance? His indictment of Borges criticizes his political failings, at the expense of acknowledging Borges' foreshadowing of culture not yet come. How many other writers hinted at the paradoxes of authorial identity and hyperreality in so pleasing a mode as short fiction? Does James' report of Borges' failures deepen our understanding or reveal new facets of art and history?

James' breezy omniscience gives the impression of a 'drive-by' approach to being in the world, and reinforces the misperception that criticism and theory come from someplace other than engagement with the work of art.

He may in fact be the greatest living (wiki)critic. The form of Barra's review underscores this perfectly, if not intentionally. It seems in fact, that Barra and many other reviewers have not identified the argument woven in the work. It is an important book if only because it illuminates as much about living in our time as it does James' 'greatness'.

Am I missing something, or are the grammatical mistakes, typos and factual errors in Barra's review intentional?

--Albert and Alfred Einstein were NOT brothers.

--"Montesque" is, I assume, the French writer Montesqieu.

--Here Barra is quoting James: "There is no reasons except imminent death for the cacophonous parade to stop." Is this Barra's mistake, or James's?

Good criticism, and good metacriticism, would seem to me to thrive on careful reading and writing. I can't really evaluate Barra's take on James, let alone James's ideas themselves, with this kind of carelessness undercutting his aticle.

I read what he had to say about Sartre in Slate. It was just one long hissy fit. It was a tantrum, a tirade.

I didn't even learn what existentialism was about from his tirade. He didn't really explain anything. All I learned was that Clive James hates Sartre about as much as Mr. Blackwell hates Courtney Love. And his article on Sartre was really just about as intelligent and instructive as you'd expect from an article by Mr. Blackwell about Courtney Love.

An educated hissy fit is still a hissy fit, and I have no respect for any intellectual like that.

Since I learned so little from that one article -- other than his personal flaming hot hatred for Sartre, that is, I don't see any reason to bother reading anything by him ever again.

Clive James has become the flavour-of-the-new-millennium by providing the kind of anti-theory, anti-academic cant which contemporary journalists such as Allen Barra lap up like warm milk. James's basic position is that all one needs to understand complicated works (textual or otherwise) and the cultures that produce them is common sense (which of course automatically precludes anyone of French extraction)and good taste, an approach that he calls "humanism," and one which appeals distinctly to pundits and columnists who have neither the time nor the inclination to do the grunt work required to check out whether James's one-liner put-downs are accurate or not. The idea that Chesterton is somehow as significant as Sartre is too nonsensical to be anything except a joke.

Barra's celebration of this Borscht-belt approach to so-called post-modernism scarcely does justice to the ideas behind the mockery, but still, one has to admit that James is absolutely the man for the times. His snappy patter is precisely calibrated for the attention-deficit disorder that drives our current public discourse, but I don't think Sartre has much to worry about. People will be taking him seriously long after the name "Clive James" evokes the response "who?", and long after future readers encountering columns celebrating him as "the greatest living critic" of the early twenty-first century will only wonder briefly what in the world that could mean. But then they'll note that George W. Bush was given two presidential terms during exactly the same period, and it will all make sense to them.