Unveiling the Complex Legacies of Bernstein, Brooks, Freidan, and Mailer: A Provocative Review by David Denby
Denby brought four assets to the task: 1) he likes and admires his four giants; 2) he never sidesteps the hairy, controversial aspects of their lives: the promiscuity of Bernstein, who was sexually ambidextrous; Mailer’s fascination with violence and the near-fatal stabbing of his second wife; the aggressive hogging of the spotlight by Friedan and Brooks; 3) he is also a New York Jew and his social and artistic life overlaps those of his subjects; 4) he writes a fluid, fluent prose and is master of the narrative essay (he reviewed films for New York and New Yorker for decades), as well as full-length nonfiction books, most notably, Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World (1996), an engrossing account of how he repeated the Great Books course at Columbia University that he’d not fully appreciated in his undergraduate days 30 years earlier.
