[In the following excerpt, Pinsker evaluates Birkerts's style, range, and method in An Artificial Wilderness.]

Sven Birkerts, a voracious reader and reviewer, is "burdened" neither by the venerable reputations that Professors Marx and Brooks enjoy nor by the tortured jargon that infects so many of his contemporaries. He writes with independence and with style and surely deserves the citation he recently won from the National Book Critics Circle for excellence in reviewing.

An Artificial Wilderness is a collection of some thirty-nine pieces written over the last seven years. Birkerts is, above all else, a wide-ranging, extraordinarily catholic reader. Indeed, his table of contents reads like an international Who's Who of the most interesting twentieth-century writers: Robert Musil, Joseph Roth, Osip Mandelstam, Marguerite Duras, Michel Tournier, Primo Levy, Lars Gustafsson, V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Julio Cortazar. Conspicuously absent, of course, are any contemporary American writers, but as Birkerts explains,

Though I had grown up on a steady diet of American moderns—Salinger, Heller, Mailer, Bellow, Percy, and others—I found that I was growing more and more dissatisfied with the local product. In this most frightening epoch, American writers seemed to have retreated into a perverse kind of hibernation. Self-consuming metafiction (Coover, Barth, Barthelme), genre subversion (Vonnegut, Doctorow, Vidal), docu-fiction (Mailer, Capote), numb affectlessness (Carver, Beattie)—none of these trends connected me with the larger picture, the world beyond words.

The writers who came to interest Birkerts "offered perspectives that allowed me to make some sense of my own disquiet." They were, in a word, more serious, more engaged with the problematical:

Maybe because the authors had known more directly the brutalities of history—had suffered—they were able to break that terrible membrane of self. Their sentences seemed to lead me toward things, places, and events. Many—most—were bleak in outlook, but somehow the very fact of their writing assured me that we still moved within the realm of meaning.

Birkerts makes no apology for his admittedly eclectic method: "I write about what has moved or affected me as a reader." Nonetheless, there is every bit as much vision in An Artificial Wilderness as there is in The Pilot and the Passenger or On the Prejudices, Predilections, and Firm Beliefs of William. The difference, of course, is that Birkerts is grappling more directly than the others with our post-Holocaust condition and what it means to somebody formed by reading books. As he puts it:

I see now that my choice of subjects has everything to do with the life we have all been living in the last decades. The essays are a kind of thinking by proxy, a way of testing perspectives. The recurrent questions are simple in the asking, but they are no less daunting for that. How did humanism—the faith in an ongoing human enterprise—fail? What has come in the wake of that failure? What are the grounds for hope, if any?

In one way or another Birkerts's essays pose these questions, and search for instances of moral courage, examples of artistic integrity, hedges against our collective ruin. To read An Artificial Wilderness is to feel the delicate balance within which we exist.

The same refusal to blink in the face of unpleasantness that we see on the general level in this book is present as well on more specific—and more exclusively literary—matters. For example, this is what Birkerts has to say about "minimalism" in a piece about Marguerite Duras:

Minimalism is, for the practitioner, one of the more seductive literary modes. Like abstract painting, it looks easy, and as most of the action takes place in the realm of the unstated, the writer need not be bothered with the messy mechanics of plot or character development. Hemingway bewitched several generations of prose stylists with his primer-simple narratives and his aesthetic of exclusion: the unstated emotion, he maintained, can pack as much of a wallop as the stated one. In his hands the technique often worked—the early stories and novels, especially, quiver with repressed materials; but his legion of imitators the world over have given understatement a bad name. Few of them have bothered to learn the all-important distinction to that aesthetic—that the emotion, though not declared, must nevertheless exist. Most of us, I suspect, now balk when confronted with a page of fashionably lean prose. Dress it up how you will, I say it's spinach and I say to hell with it.

Birkerts's last remark can, of course, be applied as well to a good many collections of critical essays: dress them up in dust jackets and they're still so much spinach. But this is decidedly not the case with the books under consideration here. Marx, Brooks, and Birkerts do much more than merely demonstrate that the literary essay is alive and well; indeed, they suggest the complicated ways in which an individual piece becomes part of a larger, more significant pattern.