Volume 43, Number 9 · May 23, 1996
'Zola: A Life'
By Roger Shattuck, Reply by John Weightman
In response to Between Animal and Angel
(March 21, 1996)
To the Editors:
One of the least appealing aspects of many contemporary works of non-fiction, and even of fiction, is the tendency to cushion the body of the book in layers of front matter. After a fulsome acknowledgments page, a self-congratulatory preface or introduction inform us how hard and long the author worked, why he or she chose this significant topic, and how to approach this book. In opposition, I have always favored the trenchant stylistic maxim derived from Baudelaire: "Coupez la tête et la queue."
I was surprised, therefore, when John Weightman [NYR, March 21] lodged the following complaint against Frederick Brown's Zola: A Life:
He provides no preface to explain why he undertook such an enormous labor of scholarship; he just starts straight in with an account of Zola's father....
Bravo for Brown, who skips the explanatory front matter. Weightman also complains about the lack of a conclusion. Yet the book closes naturally enough with Zola's death. Banish appendages.
Since, on the jacket of Brown's book, I express a distinctly higher opinion of it than John Weightman does, I am an interested party. But I hope Brown's resistance to convention here will be seen as a virtue, not the object of grumpy criticism.
Roger Shattuck
Boston, Massachusetts
