[In the following review, Brown appreciates the way Birkerts treats "literature as literature" in An Artificial Wilderness, outlining the contents of the book.]

Sven Birkerts began his career as a member of that menaced species, the bookseller whose passion is "the unpunished vice of reading," the bookseller who is also a talented man (or woman, like Sylvia Beach) of letters and whose shop is no Walden or Crown supermarket of perishable print but the equivalent of a literary salon. He carries on the tradition of an Edmund Wilson and writes, not for the specialist, but for the cultivated general reader. He deplores the jargon, the unreadability of much academic criticism. He insists that "literature is worth nothing if it can not help us make sense of our historical circumstance." He regrets that so many contemporary American writers have failed to do this and "have retreated … into the dumb affectlessness" of a Carver, of a Beattie. So he sought guidance elsewhere, in the work of Europeans like Milosz, Frisch, Kundera; and they, in their turn, led him back to their great predecessors, Musil, Benjamin, Mandelstam.

Like Larbaud before him, Birkerts proclaims himself "an amateur": "These essays are finally the arguments and enthusiasms of a reader. An amateur. They advance no strict program, no theoretical fortifications." Not that he is indifferent to all the competing modern esthetic theories. It's simply that he refuses to "make peace with any discipline that promotes its own interests over those of the text in question." He is convinced that many of the most significant authors of our time "are from cultures that feel the sharp pressure of history." Combinatory exercises, not to mention "indeterminacies" and "sliding signifiers," "can't matter much to the writer who would speak of hunger, terror, or the ongoing incidence of evil." Within the area of twentieth-century literature, his range is very wide and inevitably somewhat superficial. The section on German writing includes pieces on Musil (one of the most important), Walser, Roth, Frisch, Gregor von Rezzori, Böll, Bernhard. Only two Russians, Mandelstam and Brodsky, are commented upon. The section, "XXth Century Constellations" is an omnium gatherum of French (Cendrars, Yourcenar, Duras, Tournier), Italian (Umberto Eco, Primo Levi), and Latin American (Borges, Cortázar) authors and touches in passing on Naipaul, Walcott, Yaakov Shabtai, Rushdie. Perhaps the most interesting essay in this group, "The School of Gordon Lish" (Lish is an influential editor with Knopf), throws an unflattering light on a type of fiction currently in vogue, which "represents an abrogation of literary responsibility": "If fiction is to survive as something more than a coterie sport, it must venture something greater than a passive reflection of fragmentation and unease."

Among the "critics and thinkers" grouped in part 4, Birkerts expresses his greatest enthusiasm for Walter Benjamin, "a flâneur" who practiced "the esthetics of indirection," and discusses Erich Heller, Montale, Roger Shattuck, George Steiner, and Cyril Connolly—who, we are somewhat surprised to learn, "was, by the time he died, England's, and perhaps the world's, leading critic." The volume concludes with a miscellaneous group of essays on television, on literary biography, on Flaubert's Madame Bovary and leaves the reader with the sense of pleasure which comes from sharing the enthusiasm of a discerning critic who takes an infectious delight in literature as literature.