His America is an atomized country, with few children or parents, with little sense of the past or future. Random sex is an exalted activity. Edmund White has crossed 'The Catcher in the Rye' with 'De Profundis,' J.D. Salinger with Oscar Wilde, to create an extraordinary novel. It is a clear and sinister pool in which goldfish and piranhas both swim. This book is, provokingly, a challenge to taste, which is likely to vary from one reader to another or even from moment to moment in the same reader.
Several considerations make the book universal.
His biography is so meticulously researched and detailed, his understanding and illumination of the works is so rich, that the book ultimately succeeds in resisting the nagging temptation of reductionism. The sense of an ending gives the best of these stories an almost unearthly beauty. What is new about Barthes's posthumous reputation is the view of him as a writer whose books of criticism and personal musings must be admired as serious and beautiful works of the imagination. Miss Ozick strikes me as the best American writer to have emerged in recent years. Almost 10 years after his death, Vladimir Nabokov has provided us with the literary event of the season.