Against Gawkerspeak

Late last year, I spent some time with the writer Elizabeth Hardwick, reading her essays on politics, literature, Kentucky, and whatever else was of interest to her in a lengthy, fascinating career that has gotten renewed attention since her death in 2007. Hardwick is delightful, cutting, and difficult to pin down, a putative liberal with few shibboleths. But ideology was not why I sought her out or why I kept reading; it was, simply, style. Hardwick is the sort of writer we see too few of these days, someone who wrote with both great precision and ambition, her language in defiance of the ordinary. She was talking to you, always, but she was going to take you seriously.