Twentieth-Century Attitudes: Literary Powers in Uncertain Times.

Twentieth-Century Attitudes: Literary Powers in Uncertain Times, by Brooke Allen (Ivan R. Dee, 256 pp., $26)

IN the introduction to this, her first collection of essays, Brooke Allen declares: "Really good writers do not write well in spite of the foibles, prejudices, and fallacies of their times; instead they crystallize these oddities into something universal, create archetypes rather than characters or situations. ... [The 20th] was a colorful and grotesque century, and it produced a wide variety of odd attitudes."

Just who were these "really good writers"? Therein lies the joy of this collection, most of which first appeared in The New Criterion, where I am an editor. Allen presents what some might call a revisionist reading of the age: Steinbeck and Mailer, out; Isherwood and Henry Green, in. She elevates the century's marginalized authors--the gossips, the unbelievers, the ones who took some distance, wisely, we might now say, between themselves and the big ideas around them. We therefore learn about Green: "Throughout the thirties (the decade in which ... all [his] contemporaries ... were producing literature of passionately leftwing inspiration) Green was engaged in the painstaking composition of Party Going, a novel that dwells almost exclusively upon the fatuous doings of a group of rich and aimless young people." And Christopher Isherwood: Although he "made an unremitting effort to impose a serious structure on his life, his strong suit, ultimately, was frivolity." We also run into Harold Ross, James Thurber, Evelyn Waugh, and of course the Mitford sisters (Nancy was "a truly original light novelist and world-class practitioner of the art of tittle-tattle"). The result is enlightening, fun, eminently readable, and wonderfully, woefully politically incorrect.