Trying It Out in America: Literary and Other Performances - Softcover

Poirier, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374529183 ISBN 13: 9780374529185

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003

Synopsis

The experimental genius of American artists-interpreted by one of our most dependably brilliant critics.

Richard Poirier suggests, in the title of his new book, that the United States has been uncommonly hospitable to literary and artistic experimentation, to innovation and daring. Just as the nation likes to imagine itself as always in a state of becoming and renewal, some of its greatest writers seem willing to accept a measure of neglect during their lifetimes while remaining confident of posthumous triumph. With analytical daring and shrewd literary delicacy, Poirier advances these themes in essays ranging from Emerson and Whitman to "those avowed imperialists of the novelistic imagination Herman Melville, Henry James, and Norman Mailer," along with kindred twentieth-century figures such as T. S. Eliot and Frank O'Hara, Gertrude Stein and Marianne Moore.

Poirier's explorations of the American scene are not limited to poets and novelists. His moving account of the American ballets of George Balanchine, of Bette Midler in performance, of the reclusive Arthur Inman-whose immense diary offers incomparable glimpses into daily life during World War II-and his challenging refutations of some persistent myths of American "manhood" and of America itself, by outside observers like Jean Baudrillard or Martin Amis, will bring readers to a new appreciation of the most interesting (and difficult) features of American culture.

About this title

Review:

Among the figures Richard Poirier takes on in this collection of book reviews and critical essays are titans of America's queer literary tradition such as Walt Whitman and Gertrude Stein (plus, among more modern writers, Truman Capote and Frank O'Hara). But Trying It Out in America is not queer criticism, though the chapters on Balanchine's choreography and Bette Midler's 1975 Broadway musical revue certainly make such an interpretation tempting. There's a broader concern at stake, in that the objects of Poirier's attention are "in an always precarious, quite often faltering equilibrium. They hope to appeal to a large contemporary audience who buys, reads, and spreads the good word about books. At the same time they write in a fashion meant to be taken as original and likely to be thought difficult." Thus there are chapters on Gore Vidal's historical sagas and Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings (deemed his "strangest book"), and a consideration of outsider perspectives on America, including those of Jean Baudrillard and Martin Amis. The collection is hampered somewhat by the time-specific nature of many of the essays, which were first published as book reviews in journals such as The New York Review of Books. But as a time capsule of literary concerns of late-20th-century America, it is a sophisticated and intelligent read.

About the Author:

Richard Poirier is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University, chairman of the board of The Library of America, founding editor of Raritan Quarterly, and the author of many books on American and twentieth-century literature.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0374529183
• ISBN 13: 9780374529185
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 332