James Wolcott's Losing Battles

“Everyone is entitled to his own nostalgia,” wrote the Vanity Fair critic James Wolcott in a review of George W.S. Trow’s polemical memoir, My Pilgrim’s Progress. But entitled on what terms? Wolcott is easily displeased by writing concerned with golden ages, slipping standards and vanished values. Trow was accused of wearing his “doldrums” about the dumb present as a badge of integrity; Gail Pool was found guilty of “moping” in Faint Praise, her monograph about the decline of American book reviewing; the nostalgia in Frank Rich’s memoir Ghost Light had come “too early.” Yet despite his tendency to touch on, or brush past, such particularities, Wolcott’s beef really lies with the nostalgic impulse itself. “Sugarcoating the past is unworthy of someone with Trow’s brilliance,” he decided. “Where these books don’t take you,” he wrote in the final line of a piece about Harvard memoirs, “is beyond nostalgia.”