[Fadiman became one of the most prominent American literary critics during the 1930s with his insightful and often caustic book reviews for the Nation and the New Yorker magazines. In the following excerpt from a review of Inhale and Exhale, he expresses a preference for Saroyan's description of characters and incidents over pondering on a grand scale: "I must confess that when Saroyan is being most himself and telling us all about the World and Life and Time and Death, I don't understand him. "]

These 71 stories [in Inhale & Exhale]—no doubt Mr. Saroyan could have made them 571 or 5,071—are not, of course, stories at all. They're pretty much the sort of thing you remember from The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. You may not think them worth doing, but you have to admit that only the prodigious Saroyan can do them at all. So here they are, 71 lengths or chunks of Saroyan, 71 exercises in sensibility, 71 monologues, prayers, jokes, conversations, lectures, sermonettes, travel sketches, anecdotes, diary extracts, self-adjurations, and letters to the editor. Saroyan scurries around within the field of his temperament, and when he's finished with a scurry he calls it a story. Even his temperament doesn't stay put: it's about as predictable as the next move of Mr. Robins in "Jumbo." He might start anywhere, and does; end anywhere, and does. His mind, fresh, agile, and acrobatic, darts about like a water bug; and it is not perhaps too unkind to prolong the analogy by suggesting that, like the water bug, it lives on surface tension. It needs practically no support. Give Mr. Saroyan a word, a memory, and a whole battery of undifferentiated and spontaneous emotions is called into play. The slightest collision with an idea, and he is off like the wind. He is the greatest hitand-run writer in the history of American letters.

"I was glad the world was there; so I could be there too. I was alone, so I was sad about everything, but I was glad too. It is the same anyway. I was so glad about everything I was sad." Now, what are you going to do with a man who feels like that and writes like that? What is he talking about? Don't try to pin me down, gentlemen. It may be something pretty big. It may be something awfully trivial. How do you check up? Saroyan is his own court of last resort. Tell him it's nonsense, and he'll agree, with charming alacrity. But he will add that it's his nonsense, and that anyway, you're reading it, aren't you? And he's got you there. You are reading it.

You may get tired of the dull sound of Saroyan steadily pounding his chest in the Whitman manner and bellowing that he's in love with Life, that he's simply crazy about Life, that Life, folks, is better than Death. Still, he is in love with it, no faking, and not many writers of our time are. And just because he's quite persuaded that Life (whatever that is) is superior and preferable to Death, his prose, some of it acquires a crazy, incoherent vitality all its own. I doubt that this vitality has anything to do with literature—I mean literature of the pre-Saroyan epoch—but there it is, all set to give you a tingling sensation, very much like a nickel-in-the-slot electric battery.

Since The Daring Young Man, Saroyan has become a required taste. I think with exceptions below noted I'll beg off. I fear, after all, I'm not what is known as a vanguard critic. For I must confess that when Saroyan is being most himself and telling us all about the World and Life and Time and Death, I don't understand him. When he is being most profound and old-Russian (by the way, who would ever have thought that the old Slavic yearn would come back to us fifty years later via Armenia and San Francisco?), I don't understand him. I don't understand his purple passages at all at all, and I would like to remind him timidly that most such passages have a sign on them reading Dead End. No, 438 pages of spontaneity are too much for this dusty, academic mind. Perhaps an ingrained puritanism prevents me from enjoying the spectacle of 71 masterpieces being created one after the other without the slightest effort. That sort of thing should be left to the Deity. C'est Son métier. In general, I like Mr. Saroyan and I like many of his feelings, but only occasionally do his feelings and himself and English prose connect simultaneously in a way that makes sense to me.

But once in a while they do connect, and then, while I can't join the cult lock, stock, and barrel, I will cheer as violently as anyone for this surprising young Near-Eastern Far-Westerner. When, as in "The Broken Wheel" (a beautiful story), he is recalling simply and gravely some queer memory of his valiant childhood, I think he's a wonder. And I like the lighthearted, sardonic way in which he writes funny stories, such as the hilarious "Our Little Brown Brothers the Filipinos." Let him but write out of a hot, fused core of fine feeling, as he does in "The Armenian & the Armenian," and he's irresistible. Tie him down to a specific person or incident, and he offers something strange and lovely. In fact, I think he's a flop only when he's being a Great Writer. But that seems so often.