Critics' choices for Christmas - book reviews

Richard Webster's Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science, and Psychoanalysis (Basic Books, $35,688 pp.) is not the first attack on the theory and practice of Freudian psychoanalysis, but it is exceptionally searching, lucid, and well-argued, and linked to an ambitious project for a true science of human nature which Freud, in Webster's view, promised but did not deliver. It is impossible to read this book without having one's respect for Freud shaken and diminished; but possible also to learn from it without accepting Webster's thesis that Freud's ideas were totally worthless. He demonstrates convincingly that the growth of the psychoanalytic movement corresponds closely to the historical development of religions, but this does not necessarily discredit either religion or psychoanalysis, if one believes they both answer some fundamental human need. An intellectually exciting, challenging book.

It's always interesting to learn about the private, personal, inner lives of one's professional peers and colleagues. This year I have read a number of revealing autobiographical works by people I first encountered either in print or at academic conferences as authorities in the field of literary theory and literary scholarship. Sir Frank Kermode, the doyen of English critics, published a beautifully written, painfully honest, and often dryly amusing memoir, Not Entitled (Farrar Straus Giroux, $23, 272 pp.) of which my only complaint is that it might have been longer. The account of his wartime service in the Navy reads like an inspired collaboration between Joseph Conrad and Evelyn Waugh.

Sandra M. Gilbert is best known as one of the founding mothers of feminist criticism (co-author of The Madwoman in the Attic), but she is also a published poet, and there is poetic eloquence as well as incisive analysis of the mystifications of medical and legal practice in Wrongful Death (Norton, $22.50, 352 pp.). This is a riveting account of the death of her beloved husband following a routine operation, and how she uncovered the negligence that caused it. It is also an illuminating meditation on the effect of sudden bereavement and how to cope with it.

Two other distinguished women professors have published confessional works this year. Susan Suleiman, professor of French literature at Harvard, movingly describes in Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook (University of Nebraska Press, $25,176 pp.) a series of visits to the country she left with her parents at the age of ten, and her efforts to recover, through memory and research, her Jewish, middle-European roots, and a fuller sense of her own identity. Jane Tompkins, revisionist historian of American literature at Duke, reveals a surprisingly vulnerable, anxious inner self in A Life in School (Addison Wesley, $22,228 pp.). The book describes her growing disillusionment with the institutional structures and ethos of American higher education, and develops a utopian vision of how it might be changed for the better. (Ironically, for this reader, her ideal model has much in common with British universities as they were about thirty years ago.) All these books I think reflect in different ways the writers' dissatisfaction with impersonal, theory-driven academic discourse, and a desire to express feeling in some more direct and "creative" kind of writing.

In my year's reading of literary fiction, two novels by Indian writers stand out. A Fine Balance (Knopf, $26,603 pp.) by Rohinton Mistry (resident in Canada since 1975) reminds one of nineteenth-century masters like Zola in its harrowing account of life among the poor and the very poor in India, but it is lightened by passages of exquisite deadpan humor, deadly political satire, and touching but unsentimental examples of redeeming human kindness. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize this year, and a worthy winner of the Commonwealth Prize. The winner of the Best First Book award in the latter competition was Vikram Chandra's Red Earth & Pouring Rain, which I read in paperback this year (Little, Brown, $24.95, 560 pp.). Chandra teaches for half the year in America and spends the other half in Bombay. A pupil of John Barth at Johns Hopkins, he shows in this book an astonishing, precocious mastery of several different literary models - magical realism, adventure story, historical novel, and the modern novel of angst and alienation - and a Kiplingesque ability to embrace the contrasting cultures of East and West. I also enjoyed another outstanding British first novel, Kate Atkinson's droll, Shandean account of family life, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (St. Martin's, $22.95,384 pp.) which won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. But probably nothing gave me as much unalloyed pleasure as reading, for the umpteenth time, Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies, scrupulously edited with an informative introduction and notes by Richard Jacobs for the Penguin Twentieth Century Classics series.

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