Issyvoo

Elizabeth Hardwick’s opinions

• Look Homeward, Angel

  Reading Look Homeward, Angel is today a recovery of time or a visit to the bygone in the manner of nineteenth-century fiction with its blacksmiths, ragmen, people on foot for seven miles after returning from the sea.

  Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Elizabeth Hardwick New York Review of Books 2000
• Thomas Wolfe

  He was outsize in every respect; hugeness is his dominating iconography. Six feet four-and- a-half inches tall; awkward, handsome, impressive, and intimidating. A prodigious drinker and brawler, sleepless to produce the pages that arrived at the publisher in a crate, or so it was said.

  Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Elizabeth Hardwick New York Review of Books 2000
• American Pastoral

  American Pastoral is a sort of Dreiserian chronicle of the Levov family. Their painfully built fortune, even without the disgrace, might have declined owing to obsolescence, slower than a bomb, but going by the name of bankruptcy.

  Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Elizabeth Hardwick New York Review of Books 1997
• Philip Roth

  The structure of Roth’s fiction is based often upon identifying tirades rather than actions and counter-actions, tirades of perfervid brilliance, and this is what he can do standing on his head or hanging out the window if need be. The tirades are not to be thought of as mere angry outbursts in the kitchen after a beer or two, although they are usually angry enough since most of the characters are soreheads of outstanding volubility.

  Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Elizabeth Hardwick New York Review of Books 1997
• The House of Mirth

  The tragic force of this ambitious early novel—early in her career at least—has to do with the broadness of conception, the immediacy of the strokes and scenes, rather than, as was so often later the case, a concentration upon details of manners…

  Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Elizabeth Hardwick New York Review of Books 1988
• Henry James

  I am very struck by the revisions of Henry James. They seem to me always interesting, but in the end quite minor—changes in a few words, shiftings. The powers of concentration the great writers show are extraordinarily moving.

  Read the full piece at The Paris Review Elizabeth Hardwick The Paris Review 1985
• A Single Man

  If A Single Man seems tired, it is also true in feeling. It is a sad book, with a biological melancholy running through it, a sense of relentless reduction, daily diminishment.

  Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Elizabeth Hardwick New York Review of Books 1964