Critical Mass: Four Decades of Essays, Reviews, Hand Grenades and Hurrahsby James Wolcott (Doubleday, £18)
The critic James Wolcott got his big break in 1971 courtesy of Norman Mailer. Wolcott, a student at Frostburg State University in Maryland, had written a lively account for his college newspaper of Mailer’s tussle with Gore Vidal on the Dick Cavett Show. Wolcott sent the piece to Mailer, who was duly impressed and recommended him to the editor of the Village Voice in New York. By autumn 1972, Wolcott had quit university, moved to New York and begun his life as a freelancer. He’s been writing ever since, swaggering his way through publications such as Esquire, Vanity Fair and the New York Review of Books, serving up pieces on everything from The Sex Pistols to Ayn Rand.
As a critic, pleasure is Wolcott’s guiding principle. While his new essay collection includes a few takedowns—there’s a particularly deft dissection of Joyce Carol Oates’s graphomania—for the most part Critical Mass is heavier on the hurrahs than the hand grenades. Wolcott has a gift for communicating dizzy excitement about his favourite artists. He was one of the first journalists to champion The Ramones, and he’s no less sharp on Larkin’s poetry or Alfred Hitchcock (whose “greatness is as a pictorial showman—a creator of billboards”).
Wolcott’s one-style-fits-all approach—always wisecracking, his sentences always dressed to impress—means that these pieces begin to blur into each other after a while. But, to paraphrase Wolcott, at its best, this book offers a sublime buzz.
The critic James Wolcott got his big break in 1971 courtesy of Norman Mailer. Wolcott, a student at Frostburg State University in Maryland, had written a lively account for his college newspaper of Mailer’s tussle with Gore Vidal on the Dick Cavett Show. Wolcott sent the piece to Mailer, who was duly impressed and recommended him to the editor of the Village Voice in New York. By autumn 1972, Wolcott had quit university, moved to New York and begun his life as a freelancer. He’s been writing ever since, swaggering his way through publications such as Esquire, Vanity Fair and the New York Review of Books, serving up pieces on everything from The Sex Pistols to Ayn Rand.
As a critic, pleasure is Wolcott’s guiding principle. While his new essay collection includes a few takedowns—there’s a particularly deft dissection of Joyce Carol Oates’s graphomania—for the most part Critical Mass is heavier on the hurrahs than the hand grenades. Wolcott has a gift for communicating dizzy excitement about his favourite artists. He was one of the first journalists to champion The Ramones, and he’s no less sharp on Larkin’s poetry or Alfred Hitchcock (whose “greatness is as a pictorial showman—a creator of billboards”).
Wolcott’s one-style-fits-all approach—always wisecracking, his sentences always dressed to impress—means that these pieces begin to blur into each other after a while. But, to paraphrase Wolcott, at its best, this book offers a sublime buzz.
