It is gratifying to read so calm and academically mellow a book [as A Rhetoric of Irony] in days like these when so much is hurried and harried and always going awry. But A Rhetoric of Irony is hard to review. For besides its saying so much so well, the appeal of the subject matter makes the reviewer, like Jimmy Durante's everybody, want to get into the act….

By "rhetoric" [Booth] has in mind the ways whereby the use of irony establishes a bond of "communion" between writer and reader. When a sentence would be interpreted one way if taken straight, quite as it says on its surface, and a wholly different way if read with the proper ironic discount, then ironic writer and ironic reader are in league. They share a realm for which the literal-minded are self-excluded. This is what Booth seems to be saying….

Having led us eventually to such advanced ironics as the novels and plays of Samuel Beckett, Booth uncorks a prize irony of his own, when concluding (persuasively, I think) that Beckett "aspires to the condition not of non-being but of perfect being"—and if Beckett were to "unmask himself" by translating the "covert affirmation" of the values implicit in his writings into "some 'straight' medium, he would sound like Norman Vincent Peale."

Discussing Beckett as a traditional ironist whose "constant running allusiveness to the whole history of culture" makes him vulnerable to "the traditional charge of elitism," Booth further refers to acquaintances who have "identified not with the elitist author but with his vermiform characters," at the price of "hypersolemnity and self-pity and thus of failed comic effects." Even Beckett himself "seems more and more to risk taking himself seriously in this same self-destructive vein," whereas his "major works convey a positively bouncy verve, a joyfully rich inventiveness." But whether it is God or Godot one is waiting for, a writer might come to feel less and less bouncy at the thought that his admirers are loyally waiting for him to be more and more bouncy. (p. 25)

One tentative "however" keeps nagging at me: Booth's specifically ruling out of his territory the "ironies wrought by the author's unconscious," though he concedes that "a complete rhetoric of irony" would probably include such "deeper communings." One cannot object if, for methodological reasons, Booth explicitly decides that his book will be "about the meeting of conscious minds through irony, not the meeting of the critic's conscious mind with the artist's unconscious." The only objection would be if, under the head of the "unconscious" there are exclusions which do not properly fall under that head. I feel that something of this sort is going on when Booth neglects the sly sexual connotations (or "significances") in E. M. Forster's concern with social ratings. We have plenty of evidence in Forster's fiction to assume that he was quite aware of such ambiguities in "the snobbery and glitter in which our souls and bodies have been tangled," while "in some other category" there is to be "forged the instrument of the new dawn." Or, turning the whole thing around, what of the fact that we are "unconscious" even of how we contrive to be "conscious"? (p. 26)