We live in what might be called the Age of Doctorow, when to consider the role of ideas in American fiction is to think largely of novels built around modish, crudely conceived, and aesthetically unassimilated sociopolitical notions—novels that, far from challenging a reader to ponder his preconceptions about anything, offer those who share the author’s biases an opportunity for self-congratulation. In such an era, one particularly esteems a writer like Guy Davenport, who differs from his more representative colleagues in that he is a formidable intellectual, in that the artist in his fiction is generally the master of the man of ideas, and in that those ideas are more than superficially provocative.
It might be said of Davenport, as someone in his new collection observes of Auden’s Letters from Iceland, that he practices “a species of writing where any and everything fits in.” This is not to suggest that there is anything haphazard about the structure or contents of Davenport’s stories, but simply to note that he manages, within a rigorously contrived design, to incorporate a wide range of materials, and to write a prose that is at once lush—drawing liberally on obscure and foreign locutions—and fastidious. Though three of the four stories here are brief, slight, and relatively straightforward narratives, the principal offering, a novella entitled “Wo ar, soll ich warden” (which concludes a trilogy begun with “Apples and Pears” and The Jules Verne Steam Balloon), is typical of his longer works in