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Wilfrid Sheed presents a problem to anyone proposing to review one of his books more or less in good faith. My drugstore editions of his novels are crusted over with reviewers' enthusiastic ravings, the kind that suggest a limited education or backstage payola; but Sheed himself has sardonic words for such goings‐on in “Max Jamison,” his novel about the perils of reviewing, and in “The Politics of Reviewing,” the lead essay in his new collection of criticism of books, films and plays. And I'm somehow supposed to review this book of reviews, by a brilliant reviewer who knows all the tricks and openly despises most of them, in a publication whose editor, John Leonard, has supplied Sheed's book with an exuberant Foreword in which he suggests that he wishes Sheed could write all the reviews for The Times Book Review. One feels pretty threatened even before geginning.

Sheed's own theory of reviewing isn't much help: “for the slicks you do need certain rudimentary entertainment skills—a comic use of the first person, a bag of shiny phrases. For the rest, simple waltz steps will do.” Once things like that are said out loud, first‐person comedy turns into selfconscious blurting (see above), shiny phrases go rusty in the hand and the poor reviewer can only lurch around the ballroom (one–two–three, one–two–three) hoping no one's really watching.

There, are few simple waltz steps in “The Morning After,” but it's hard to praise Sheed's success at an admittedly minor art without seeming to fawn, and hard to carp without pretending to purities as phony as low sycophancy. (“Mr. Shakespeare's coruscating wit and rich poetry have made him our most successful commercial playwright, but ‘King Lear’ shows once again that the hardest and most relevant questions of our times escape him, to say nothing of the mysteries of the human heart.”) This book is everything that it will be called by its reviewers—dazzling, hilarious, astringent, serious without pomposity, strong without rage, without o'er‐flowing full — and yet Sheed's critical performances, like his novelistic performances, deserve a more complicated response than cheers and whistling.

His way of being present in his own writing is in effect a refusal of success through the means that come easiest to his intelligence and wit, an almost insulting indifference to our readiness to admire him, our eagerness to settle, after all, for so little. His work is much in demand at the quality and slick publications alike, and one sees how his shameless lack of sham would tickle the “inside” world of writers, editors, publishers and professional reviewers, where the pretense that the game of literature is deadly serious, somehow less political, commercial and self‐advancing than the other games in town, must get positively suffocating.

Even narcissistic authors and corrupt reviewers, who after all usually know or at least nod to their own little failings, must enjoy Sheed's exposures of narcissism and corruption, so long as the names are changed and some of his own blood gets spilled along with theirs, as it certainly does. But the drugstore bookbuyer may pardonably feel confused by that sort of fun, and the habit of self‐irony looks different from outside the literary shop talk world.

Seen from outside, Sheed's literary temperament and methods look resolutely unfashionable and a good deal more serious, though these qualities are partly (and perhaps not accidentally) obscured by his mastery of the Mid‐Atlantic style, as in this sample sentence, from a review of “Thérèse and Isabelle”: “The big scene, the one they said couldn't be made, features two feet (or at the most, three) sticking out demurely from in back of an apse or chancel or whatever they call those things, while a slew of giddy subtitles fill in the rest.” That's a lovely amalgam of Bertie Wooster and Ed Hackendorper (whom you met in Chicago at the sales convention), and Sheed, who has the advantage of being a genuine Anglo‐American, as one learns from his touching essay “Confessions of a Sports Nut,” can give, pointers to all of us who aspire to sounding amusing and urbane, from Bill Buckley to Squire Mailer himself.

Still, he understands that style ?? more than words and rhythms. A?? a critic he gives approval to writer whose language breaks down received categories of apprehension, re‐creates the world through “a con stant play of metaphor and acute literalness,” but for him these recreations are suspect if they're achieved by the writer's getting all personal and formless in the contemporary way. Submission to form becomes a kind of credo, and it seems almost inevitable that many of the virtuosi he admires —Updike, Walker Percy, Chesterton and Belloc, and (in another stylistic country) Eugene McCarthy—interest him for operating within a formal outlook that's religious in general and often Roman Catholic in particular.

This outlook he defines as a determination to see things in one's own way, respect the texture of experience above intellectual formula, avoid finalities where they're impossible or irrelevant to living. He's by no means a simple electronic Christian Critic, plugging works into his spiritual circuitry to see if the fuses blow — he's stern enough, for example, with Graham Greene, when Greene cheats a little. But unhappy couples never seem to get di vorces in his novels, and he likes writers who are religious at least in accepting the reality, and affinity, of “pain and death and art,” the hard and necessary recognitions he (in a literary mugging that makes one gasp) tears the skin off Norman Podhoretz for side‐stepping in “Making It.” “Have you got anything serious you'd like to say?” Max Jamison's estranged wife once asked him. In fact be did, and so does Sheed, when the fun and games of his style lets us have a glimpse of the Christian moralist within, his mind on other, darker things all the while.

This is all admirably unfashionable, but it can tempt him into unfairness, even to Norman Podhoretz and certainly to Mailer, Pinter, James Agee, Antonioni, Death‐of‐the‐Novel theologians like Robbe‐Grillet and Susan Sontag, the “New Journalism” — any apostasy from the artistic verities he is called to uphold. Even if he's right about all of them, his defenses of the faith do sometimes get tangled up in that bright, self‐debunking style, the refusal to conceal the means being employed, fob off talent as magic, that John Leonard praises but that reminds me uncomfortably of self‐destruction mechanisms like Max Jamison, who observed of himself: “He used to compare criticism with the priesthood. One of his best gags.”

Continue reading the main story“The Morning After” as a title makes its own point about reviewing, about what its pleasures consist of and are finally worth, and it's fascinating, if a little sad, to watch so serious and gifted a man daring himself to respect the work he's so good at, pointing at his professional head a gun that, for all you or I or he knows, may be loaded after all. Sheed is probably the best professional reviewer in the business, and (as they say in blurbs) one of the best writers around; but he sometimes seems determined not to let us think so, as if the most important things that concern a man have nothing to do with writing at all. In the long run, they surely don't, but in the sprints and hurdles this understanding can get in a writer's way