Writing and Life - Softcover

Lydon, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0874517303 ISBN 13: 9780874517309

Publisher: Univ Pr of New England, 1995

Erudite, inspirational, and concise, Michael Lydon offers a celebration of the craft of writing that will serve as a guidebook for aspiring writers and avid readers. A musician and former Newsweek reporter who was a founding editor of Rolling Stone, Lydon calls writing "a visible word music, more like singing than drawing," and indeed his own prose rings with a rhythm and lyricism that exemplifies his view. With enthusiasm and great warmth, he asks a question central to all writers and readers: "What makes writing good?" and for his answers he taps sources that range from the Bible to Raymond Chandler, Shakespeare to Nabokov, Dickens to the New York Times.
What makes Lydon's study both remarkable and refreshing, however, is his conscious attempt to present an antidote to postmodern literary theory which tries to erase the presence of the author and negate the existence of an external reality. In contrast, Lydon describes in engaging, readable terms his own discovery that authors are very much alive and that reality is out there to be captured in their writing.

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Review:

Michael Lydon's four-essay volume, Writing and Life, is a learned yet awestruck celebration of writing--in particular, of writers' abilities to bring to life whole worlds by the mere marking of black symbols on a white page. Lydon's joyful literary discussions send the reader back to the exemplars of fine writing: Austen, Dickens, Defoe, Dostoyevsky, Philip Roth, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and E.B. White among others.

While Lydon's examinations of writing's relationship to art, thought, the self, and realism are not in the least prescriptive, they should be of considerable interest to the writer as well as the reader. Among Lydon's many salient points is his argument that fine writing succeeds "not by pointing us proudly to the page but by suggesting how we may look through the page to all that lies beyond." Along these lines, Lydon argues that "writing serves thought, not the other way around," and that the "miracle of writing" is that it "conveys thought mind-to-mind as if it were not there at all." Finally, though, it is Lydon's unabashed love of and thankfulness for fine literature that is as exhilarating to the reader as his favorite books are to him. "The webs [good writers] weave," he says, "become hammocks in which I lie back with utmost trust while they sing charming melodies in word. The ideas and pleasure they give challenge and cheer me, the joys and sorrows they relate convince me they know my own." --Jane Steinberg

From the Publisher:

5 x 7 trim. LC 95-13843

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