[In the following review, Mauro offers a tempered assessment of Some Necessary Angels.]

This collection of essays [Some Necessary Angels] is an uneven array of homages, nostalgic meditations, and reflections on the “writing life” that seems at odds with itself. While some of these pieces individually are engaging, as collected, they create some tension among themselves, revealing lapses and distracting inconsistencies.

In his chapter “Mentors,” Parini pays tribute to Alistair Reid, Robert Penn Warren, and Gore Vidal, each of whom has powerfully influenced him. “Their energies have charged me in different ways. … Their styles of writing, subjects, ideas, prejudices, fears, and fondnesses have played into my own.” Yet it is unclear from these essays what specifically Parini has absorbed from them. While the much later, more academic essay on Reid’s poetry articulates a fascinating view of “achieved innocence” as opposed to romantic naïveté, the relation between this view and Parini’s homage is lost. He wants to convey the sense of the “spell” and “aura” that surrounds these writers but ends up conveying a sentimental coziness that may charm the casual reader, but annoy the serious student of literature, as when he writes, “I was sitting with Gore one summer in the piazza of Ravello, drinking wine, as the cathedral threw a long shadow across the cobbled square.” Indeed, sentimental clichés abound startlingly, since in his fiction and poetry Parini’s voice is so fresh and concrete. The aging George Santayana is described as “the husk of the man,” and the Mediterranean “winks” in the distance. And in such a paean to the beauties of the language how can Thoreau’s knife-like jab at the pretensions of Concord society—“I have traveled a good deal in Concord”—become diluted under Parini’s eye to “I have traveled much in Walden” (22)?

The disjointedness is even more serious and disturbing between the essays “Amalfi Days” and “Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man.” The first begins, “Ten years ago, my wife, Devon, and I spent the better part of a year in Amalfi, a coastal town in the Naples region of southern Italy,” “having fallen in love with the particular shade of blue that seems possible only beneath a bright Mediterranean sun.” The essay continues to romantically conjure the allures of small-town Italian life, including “the crisp white walls, and vaulted ceiling” of their medieval villa and the aura of Gore Vidal’s nearby residence. In “Reflections,” the stay in Amalfi is described as a kind of self-imposed political exile. “In the mid-eighties, my wife, Devon, and I decided to detach ourselves from the United States temporarily.… It would have worked nicely had I not taken to reading Time, Newsweek, and the International Herald Tribune. … The news, which these publications did their best to make appealing, ruined my mornings.” The eerie detachment between these two views is unsettling, and it hints at an incompletely realized kind of self-fashioning.

Where the narrative self is more fully realized, Parini’s writing is truly engaging. His “interview” with John Steinbeck in heaven, as Steinbeck discusses Parini’s own biography of him, is a humble, witty, and illuminating meditation on the inescapably fictional nature of biographies. Indeed, this interview enacts the conflict discussed in the essay “The Lessons of Theory,” in which Parini’s romantic wish for a unique voice and original contribution confronts Foucault’s sense of the author as a “limiting principle.” If such a resonance rang through more of these pieces, this array might be a beautiful collection. But the noise too often obscures the music.