How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

A critic has three responsibilities: to tell would-be consumers of culture what they can expect from a given work; to assess the quality of said work; and, perhaps most importantly, to produce an interesting piece of writing. Daniel Mendelsohn—classicist, memoirist and chronicler of gay culture—demonstrates in his new collection of reviews (many of which originally appeared in The New York Review of Books) that he excels on all three counts, and does so in prose that is wise, funny and just a touch snippy.

Mendelsohn often begins his essays with examples from the Greek classics—Homer, Aristotle, Aristophanes—that accessibly illuminate the virtues and flaws of contemporary art. From there, he eases into masterful takedowns of puffed-up novels (The Lovely Bones and Middlesex); ambitious but ultimately failed films (Marie Antoinette and Troy); and overvalued, overconfident or overplayed writers (Truman Capote, Dale Peck and Philip Roth, respectively). Mendelsohn also offers revitalizing assessments of major artists, such as filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar. A high point is the author’s brilliant meditation on Brokeback Mountain, in which he persuasively argues that media discussions of the film tended to push the two main characters “back into the closet.”

If this wonderful collection has one shortcoming, it’s that it contains too few essays in which Mendelsohn analyzes what he truly likes—one wants to know what would inspire irrational exuberance in someone this smart. But upon closing the book, most readers will find themselves longing to revisit their own libraries and DVDs, or to go right out to the movies, seized by a sudden, ravenous hunger for art.

Mendelsohn reads Wed, Aug 13.