For those nostalgic for the great days of non-academic literary criticism of the Edmund Wilson school... Wilson's review of Camus's "The Stranger" in the late 1940s (in the New Yorker of course) starts off with a confession of ignorance. Wilson has not read Sartre, Camus, is ignorant of Existentialist philosophy--the intellectual milieu from which the novel in question has arisen. No matter. He will review the book anyway. I always judge critics from the past, unfairly I'm sure, by seeing whether they knew how to respond to their own contemporaries. Randall Jarrell was clueless about William Carlos Williams. He wasn't exactly going to welcome in Kenneth Koch and Frank O'Hara. Yet we are constantly told what great critics Jarrell and Wilson were. The so-called New York intellectuals never interested me--precisely because they seemed so out of synch with the literature happening all around them. There is still a group of people touting Lionel Trilling.

A depressing list of notable books of 2002 in the New York Times Book Review. Fiction and Poetry. Poets like McClatchy, Collins, Milosz. Novelists who have written novels this year--who also just happen to work for the New York Times!