April 6 1998

ARTICLE TOOLS

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God and the American Writer, by Alfred Kazin (Alfred A. Knopf, 259 pp.; $25, hardcover). Reviewed by David Lyle Jeffrey.

A mong the intellectual leaders of American society a deeply personal belief in God is tolerated as harmlessly personal, like a taste in food or a loyalty to the Red Sox. Religion even among the faithful, like American literature today, has left cosmology to the physicists. Nobody argues about God today. It is enough for the complacent that Americans go to church and synagogue in record numbers.

With these acerbic words, Alfred Kazin identifies a contemporary spiritual vacuity that troubles him even more than the ranting showmanship of "a politicized, intolerant, and paranoiac religion," with its "aims to coerce the rest of us." But it is more the spiritual aridity of American religion today, religion that doesn't matter enough, than an academic interest in literary history of the United States that prompts God and the American Writer.

Alfred Kazin is now 82 years of age. With a distinguished teaching career at a number of colleges and universities (including Harvard) and, since On Native Grounds (1942), more than 20 volumes of superior criticism, literary history, and personal reflection to his credit, he is deservedly regarded as a doyen to American literary criticism. In God and the American Writer, much that has occupied him throughout his career is brought together in a kind of grand summation. Hawthorne, Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Melville, Whitman, Lincoln, Dickinson, William James, Twain, T. S. Eliot, Frost, and Faulkner each receives a full chapter, but the text is interwoven throughout with a great many more authors of merit, from Thoreau to Toni Morrison. In all of these writers it is not their ...