In this invigorating selection of her reviews and essays ["The Eye of the Story"], Eudora Welty constantly touches the painful place where literary critic and creative writer meet. They are, she seems to suggest, essentially at cross-purposes…. The writer does not seek to solve the "mystery of language" but rather to take advantage of it. Criticism tries to solve the mystery, by translating fiction into another language….

The pieces in this book about the climate of the fiction writer's mind should be prescribed reading for all literary critics. Also included here are some essays of reminiscence, from her childhood on…. She believes—and as a Southern writer this is something on which she has been challenged—that novelists should not be political crusaders….

A long section is given over to book reviews, and here Miss Welty, given her views on academic criticism, stands in the eye not only of the story but of the storm. She stands calmly, because she is sure of her ground. She writes not so much as a critic as a sensitive reader. She makes the relationship between reading and writing extraordinarily close. The literary critic is in a way a code-breaker, and therefore an antagonist; Miss Welty is all receptiveness. She uses the words "pleasure" and "sweetness" without embarrassment or sentiment.

Not that she is without her moments of asperity. She picks out for castigation two modern trends…. The first is the "bad novel" of today that is "unhappily like the tale told to the analyst. It is not communication, it is confession—often of nothing more than some mild weakness. It is self-absorbed, self-indulgent, too often self-pitying. And it's dull." Her second target is the sort of long literary biography … that is "one whole compilation of details from outside…. One original insight would have equalled the force of a dozen of these pages." (p. 7)

[It] is in writing of those authors she most admires that the difficulty in finding a "language" for criticism, or for appreciation, becomes apparent. "I could say that [Green's] 'Concluding' is like Venus on a clear evening going down over water, and if you agreed—still worse if you disagreed—where are we now?" So she poses the problem herself. Faulkner's prose is "intolerantly and intolerably unanalyzable." In good fiction "the shapes the work takes are marvelous … it is hard to speak further of them." Words fail. Words fail because the work itself stands, and she is not prepared to diminish it "in other words."

Miss Welty leads one back to the books themselves. (p. 43)