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Odds are that most writers efforts are doomed to oblivion, and for critics that fate is practically guaranteed.
Page through any critics collected reviews and youll find raves and pans of works lost to time.
Thats the project of Michelle Deans new bookSharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion.
Forms that could once make a writer famous turn out to have shorter shelf-lives than graffiti.
Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, and Renata Adler were prodigies.
Pauline Kael and Janet Malcolm were late bloomers.
Hannah Arendt and Susan Sontag made their way through universities and then burst on the public scene.
For aspiring writers especially, these women are required reading.
But how much are they read today and do we read them the right way?
Politics werent necessarily symbiotic in Kaels scheme of thing.
The passage is from her 1971 essay Raising Kane.
This was the generation led by Dorothy Parker.
Parkers career now reads like a cautionary tale.
How can they tell?).
Volumes of her light verse were best sellers.
In Hollywood she was nominated for an Oscar for the screenplay ofA Star Is Born.
She made four figures a week during the Depression.
I just sat in an office and did nothing, she said.
There was never a novel.
Dammit, itwasthe twenties and we had to be smarty, she told aParis Reviewinterviewer in 1956.
Thats the terrible thing.
I should have had more sense.
Itwasthe twenties: Parker knew that writers are captives of their times.
She left it on to be contrarian.
Is this also true of Kael?
Her selected writings now appear under the titleThe Age of Movies.
Is that era over, now that were living in the age of prestige TV recaps?
On the spectrum from Ivory Tower to Pop, Sontag worked from the pulpit and Ephron at street level.
The most fascinating pair inSharpto scrutinize side by side is still with us Didion and Adler.
Each has been a triple threat: reporter, critic, novelist.
Though both have ended up as liberals, each began with conservative leanings.
Didion was aNational Reviewcontributor and professed Goldwater voter.
Theyre also more astonishing.
One difference between Didion and Adler is that Didion was, until she passed 80, consistently prolific.
She observes the migrants as they take German lessons, do chores around the shelter, and form friendships.
Some of them vanish from the scene without warning.
Many have painful, even tragic, interactions with the state bureaucracy.
I still deplore it.
But I now have something very like that sense.
Heres hoping, along with Adler, that her younger self was right.
