From 'Oedipus Rex' to 'Reservoir Dogs'

How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

Essays

Daniel Mendelsohn

Harper: 456 pp., $26.95

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Here, among the flight of winged darts that pierce the critical essays of Daniel Mendelsohn:

Quentin Tarantino is "incapable of saying anything about real life because everything he knows comes from the movies." There is a passivity despite the spectacular goriness, as if instead of confronting an audience with his work, he were a member of the audience watching it.

"People worry about Tarantino because they think he represents a generation raised on violence; but it's as a representative of a generation raised on television reruns and video replays that he really scares you to death."

Of novelist and critic Dale Peck's savagely witty attacks on modernist writers and his demand that James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov be largely stricken from the canon: "Canons aren't drawn up like shopping lists; they grow organically, just as genres and styles do, out of the soil of the culture that produces them."

Of a production of Euripides' "Iphigenia at Aulis" that substitutes intimate realism for the terrible allegorical distances of Greek drama: "All you got . . . was living, feeling men and women, as if what happened at Aulis was Lyme disease or a bad dot-com investment, something awful that might well befall the nice people next door and that you vaguely hope won't happen to you."

These darts are only a piquant overture to Mendelsohn's literary, theater and film essays, most published in the New York Review of Books. Thirty are collected here in "How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken." His wit is invariably harnessed to a graver wisdom; the verve and sparkle to an underlying conviction, often anguished. The epigrams have a purpose other than themselves.

He sneaks back and forth over the admittedly notional boundary between reviewing (which he does with elan and something of the contrarian provocation and pleasure of a Pauline Kael) and criticism. His scholarly specialty in classical Greek opens a larger perspective and forges some basic and burning convictions. He employs history, not so much of events as of how the arts have been conceived and used, as a means for judging what we do with them now.

Sharp as he can be in his judgments, he is equally sharp in identifying the virtues of what he doesn't like. He gives a spacious view of the countryside, whatever the particular road he hews through it. He takes his subjects seriously, but not himself. Like Snow White, you might say, he whistles while he works.