Overview
What Is What Was, Richard Stern's fifth "orderly miscellany," is the first to meaningfully combine his fiction and nonfiction. Stories, such as the already well-known "My Ex, the Moral Philosopher," appear among portraits (of the sort Hugh Kenner praised as "almost the invention of a new genre"): Auden, Pound, Ellison, Terkel, W. C. Fields, Bertrand Russell, Walter Benjamin (in both essay and story), Jung and Freud, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger.
In the book's seven sections are analyses of the Wimbledon tennis tournament as an Anglification machine, of Silicon Valley at its shaky peak, of James and Dante as travel writers, a Lucretian look at today's cosmology, American fiction in detail and depth, a "thought experiment" for Clarence Thomas, a salvation scheme for Ross Perot, a semi-confession of the writer.
The book contains but isn't philosophy, criticism, opinion, reportage, or autobiography (although the author says it is as much of this as he plans to write). There is a recurrent theme, the ways in which actuality is made and remade in description, argument and narration, fictional and nonfictional, but above all, What Is What Was is a provocative entertainment by a writer who, as Philip Roth once said, "knows as much as anyone writing American prose about family mischief, intellectual shenanigans, love blunders—and about writing American prose."
Synopsis
What Is What Was, Richard Stern's fifth "orderly miscellany," is the first to meaningfully combine his fiction and nonfiction. Stories, such as the already well-known "My Ex, the Moral Philosopher," appear among portraits (of the sort Hugh Kenner praised as "almost the invention of a new genre"): Auden, Pound, Ellison, Terkel, W. C. Fields, Bertrand Russell, Walter Benjamin (in both essay and story), Jung and Freud, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger.
In the book's seven sections are analyses of the Wimbledon tennis tournament as an Anglification machine, of Silicon Valley at its shaky peak, of James and Dante as travel writers, a Lucretian look at today's cosmology, American fiction in detail and depth, a "thought experiment" for Clarence Thomas, a salvation scheme for Ross Perot, a semi-confession of the writer.
The book contains but isn't philosophy, criticism, opinion, reportage, or autobiography (although the author says it is as much of this as he plans to write). There is a recurrent theme, the ways in which actuality is made and remade in description, argument and narration, fictional and nonfictional, but above all, What Is What Was is a provocative entertainment by a writer who, as Philip Roth once said, "knows as much as anyone writing American prose about family mischief, intellectual shenanigans, love blunders—and about writing American prose."
Publishers Weekly
In the lost world of belles lettres, these 66 short meditations would have been called "fugitive pieces"-vignettes of encounters with the famous (Pound, Auden, Ellison, Bellow), memoirs of friends and colleagues (usually writers and teachers), book reviews, poems (Stern's and others), playlets and fictions. Prolific novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist and University of Chicago English professor Stern (Golk) offers reflections so readerly that the book contains appreciations of two libraries-a small town one in Indiana and a grand one in Chicago. Stern possesses the qualities he speaks admiringly of in his book reviews: he is "a thoughtful observer," and his work exhibits an "affectionate relationship between the book's intelligence and its readers." But felicitous phrases ("Lutz's shower of lacrimal information") are often buried among redundancies, and engaging wit (Van Blederen's vandalism as a form of "critical genius"), engaged reportage (about tennis), moving eulogies and memorable moments are mingled with flotsam: an unpublished letter to the New York Times, a statement read to university faculty, pro forma tributes. Although most of these pieces were written after 1993, only an interest in Stern lends magnitude to his comments on, for example, Ross Perot or Clarence Thomas, and few of the book reviews that constitute a third of the work here possess timelessness. "I hadn't wanted to write an autobiography," Stern declares, but this miscellany, for all its fluxy attributes, is not really a good substitute. (Oct.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.