Everything is to be said for working patiently through the stages of one's subject, especially when one's subject has been as shabbily done as Wayne Booth's. What, after all, exists explicitly and directly on the subject of irony, a subject so dominant in the critical writing on modern literature that, as Booth points out [in A Rhetoric of Irony], vast numbers of articles, dissertations, and books in the last thirty years have had "irony" in their titles?… Compare the critical work that surrounds any of the better known modernists and the volume of critical writing on irony seems, indeed is, pathetically thin, reason for Booth to throw up his hands, begin at the beginning, and work his way through his subject with some deliberateness. Besides the thinness of the existing critical analysis of irony, Booth has to his advantage a manner which most serious readers of literature have come to know by now: lucid, straightforward, and precise in style; witty, at times donnishly playful; rational, reasonable, and sensible; personal, at times anecdotal, almost confidential; devastating with his antagonists, whether they are real readers of specious ironies, documented and refuted, or straw men, generalized puffers of heresies and lunacies whom Booth invokes from time to time. Above all, it is a rhetorical manner—leading the reader, explaining, explaining again, persuading, hectoring, teaching.

The result of the application of Booth's characteristic manner to his elusive subject is a book which is in some respects exemplary, in other respects quite limited. One of its virtues is its concreteness. Booth unquestionably takes delight in ironic literature, quoting passages and surrounding them with a fine, pragmatic, almost joyful sense of his own involvement. Another of its virtues is Booth's candor about the psychological tensions and ethical problems that response to irony carries with it. It is true that valuing irony as much as readers now do invites a multiplicity of readings, some of which are patently foolish. Booth has the good sense to raise the question, again and again, of what the reader has to work with and how far he is entitled to go in looking for ironies where the consensus of readers has not found them before. It is also true that irony generates feelings peculiar to itself. Faced with a reading of an ironic work different from one's own, a reader is likely to feel threatened; having discovered to one's own satisfaction the meaning of an ironic passage, one is likely to be triumphant and smug. Irony does have a life of its own, and Booth is often very knowing on the psychological gestalt within which it occurs.

The most solid of the book's virtues is Booth's analysis of what he calls "stable irony." By stable irony, he means verbal patterns in which a meaning is covert, intentionally so, and "stable or fixed, in the sense that once a reconstruction of meaning has been made, the reader is not then invited to undermine it with further demolitions and reconstructions."… From this definition, Booth moves on to a series of demonstrations showing how a reader does, in fact, reconstruct, the whole process separated into its stages even though, as Booth readily admits, the whole complicated reconstruction of real meaning from irony may take only a few moments. Sooner or later, most readers of those reconstructions are likely, I think, to find them labored, perhaps too self-assured, perhaps too schematized. But the range of exhibits is extensive; Booth's method is controlled and responsible; and, by and large, an attentive reader does go through the mental movements that Booth describes, arriving at judgments of reconstructed meanings that are largely similar to Booth's.

Almost every major figure Booth touches, however, suggests the limitations of his approach. In a chapter on the ironist's voice, for example, he considers a passage from Fielding, sensibly and responsibly, I think. But the critical literature on Fielding in the last twenty years is filled with analyses, some of them brilliant, of Fielding's irony, and Booth ignores not only that body of criticism but the issues it raises…. It is a substantial body of work and it is not made up of fanciful overreadings of Fielding's text. What it points to is a vision of the world, complex, ambiguous, and ambivalent, several-planed, in which the author is willing to entertain at once human possibility and human limitation, change and the impossibility of change. Fielding, after all, learned his art from Cervantes more than anybody. And so it is a comedown to find a mind so rich and well stocked as Booth's treating irony in Fielding as a question of saying one thing and meaning another.

So it is with Jane Austen, whom Booth analyzes several times. Again, Booth answers the questions he asks of Jane Austen's passages shrewdly and sensibly. But the questions are never large enough. (pp. 277-78)

In his last forty pages Booth deals with what he calls "unstable ironies." "The author—insofar as we can discover him, and he is often very remote indeed—refuses to declare himself, however subtly, for any stable proposition, even the opposite of whatever proposition his irony vigorously denies."… It is the place to end the discourse, and Booth turns his discussion appropriately to an analysis of Beckett which is, like all of his analyses, thoughtful and searching. But the book ends, as it begins, with its attention upon "statements" and their negations, and again it seems too limited a method.

If I think of some of the genuinely problematic books, books about which reasonable men disagree and always will, Don Quixote, Moby Dick, The Trial, it seems to me that they are as interesting and as problematic as they are because of certain qualities of vision related to what Trilling describes of Jane Austen and which we have come to call irony. Despite the precision and the thoroughness of Booth's book, those large vexed books seem beyond his interest. At his best in telling us how we come to know that Hume is ironic about Providence and what difference it makes that we do, Booth leaves the reviewer in the uncomfortable position of taking him to task for not having written a bigger book that tells us why wise and patient men cannot agree about what Kafka thought of Joseph K. and what difference that makes. (p. 279)