Man of letters.(Book Review)

The Norman Podhoretz Reader: A Selection of His Writings from the 1950s through the 1990s Edited by Thomas Jeffers Free Press, $35, 496 pages

New York City writer, polemicist, and man of letters Norman Podhoretz is consistently consigned to pigeonholes and niches by his enemies on the left. Yet he regularly springs out of them by force of intellect and originality. Writers who come to mind when reading Podhoretz include Edmund Wilson and George Orwell. But no one writing today can be so closely compared to him as Paul Johnson, the British editor and historian who provides the penetrating introduction of this volume. Johnson writes that Podhoretz's thoughts are "deep, sinewy, often very direct and even strident, but equally often surprising and unexpected, never predictable."

As Johnson suggests, Podhoretz is at heart a surpriser; he never lands quite where you expect. This tendency derives from an open-ended intellect and a capacity for literary criticism and political analysis that strives, as Matthew Arnold wrote, "to see the object as in itself it really is." In his 1963 essay, "My Negro Problem--and Ours," Podhoretz turned from the social-protest writing of the period to reflect, without an ounce of racism and fully supportive of the struggle for integration, on his own experience growing up in the poverty-stricken Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville: "For a long time I was puzzled to think that Jews were supposed to be rich when the only Jews I knew were poor, and that Negroes were supposed to be persecuted when it was the Negroes who were doing the only persecuting I knew about--and doing it, moreover, to me." He writes that "it was the whites, the Italians, and Jews, who feared the Negroes, not the other way around." This is Podhoretz the troublemaker from way back, offending his brethren on the left with truth-telling that adds nuance and complexity. As politically incorrect as it is, that essay has made its way into many anthologies of black-white dialogue, its brilliance overcoming its detractors.

"Israel--With Grandchildren" is another powerful essay. Its argument against the Israeli Left's undermining of its country's capacity for survival (a clear parallel to the role of the Left in the U.S. in opposing a strong military) is intensified by the naked emotion Podhoretz expresses in his fear for his grandchildren in Israel. Podhoretz's writing is clear and pure.

Whether as memoirist, political thinker, or literary critic, Podhoretz unravels complex issues with iron logic and honest emotion. He is a shrewd--but appreciative--critic of Philip Roth, Mark Twain, Vladimir Nabokov, and Milan Kundera. He is generous and fair, and does not shrink from criticizing friends and praising foes.

He offers, for instance, a devastating appraisal of the limitations of Saul Bellow. Bellow is as close to Podhoretz's ideological camp as any riving writer, and one who has attempted "a sense of joyous connection with the common grain of American life." But in Podhoretz's perceptive view, what emerged in The Adventures of Augie March was a strained optimism, a "willed buoyancy" expressed by a protagonist "who is curiously untouched by his experience, who never changes or develops, who goes through everything but undergoes nothing." Podhoretz concludes with regret that all of Bellow's voices are the author's own, not ...