Lament for Susan

The New York Review of Books regularly offers readers new editions of a supposedly neglected masterpiece, and in some cases the first publication of a never-published, almost unknown work, which we are suddenly summoned to praise. Those of us who are not in the room, or the groupchat, where decisions about what reputations are to be revived or made can meet the injunctions of the NYRB press with earnest good faith in their latest dispensations (“now is the time to read Magda Szabó—take Agota Kristof away!”); with cautious, sifting, suspicion; or with outright rejection, on the grounds that what the editors declare a “classic” is almost certainly a subcanonical instance of Europe’s endlessly dying modernism or its American imitations.