William Giraldi, author of the critical prose collected in American Audacity: In Defense of Literary Daring, is that rarest of creatures: a learned, witty, tough-minded, and discriminating man of letters. In the era of social media and instant information, when such culture as we have consists of non-art and pseudo-art and even anti-art, when judgment and fastidiousness are regarded with suspicion and scorn, the serious critic, Giraldi avers, “must be prepared to retake his traditional place as the arbiter of culture.” These pieces—culled from the pages of The New Republic, The Daily Beast, and other major outlets—prove that we have in our midst a critic eager to take up the cudgels for literature, and perfectly willing to escalate the war against kitsch and cliché, groupthink and faddism.
Giraldi, whose previous books include two acclaimed novels and a memoir, took the advice of his former professor Geoffrey Hill and set out to work “as a reviewer or literary essayist for the ‘common reader,' as Dr. Johnson meant it.” Let us rejoice that Giraldi listened to Hill, for criticism of this caliber may go a long way toward reviving our debased literary culture. Giraldi asserts, in an uncompromising critical credo, that the critic must first be a reader and lover of literature, one who conceives of the art as “a means of enlargement and enhancement and understanding.” “The critic,” he insists, “should be tethered to no theory, no ideology, no asphyxiating ism.” Defying our ethos of zealous politicization, Giraldi makes so bold as to declare that “Ideology is the enemy of art because ideology is the end of imagination.” The critic's sole fealty, he concludes, “is to the duet of beauty and wisdom, to the well made and usefully wise, and to the ligatures between style and meaning.” If such critics as Lionel Trilling and Randall Jarrell can be said to have a twenty-first-century heir, surely Giraldi is the man.
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