Volume 41, Number 5 · March 3, 1994
Fatal Attraction
By John Banville
Cigarettes Are Sublime
by Richard Klein
Duke University Press, 210 pp., $21.95
Cigarettes Are Sublime is a wise and timely book: it is also sly, funny, and peculiarly seductive. It aims to be, the author tells us in his preface, 'simultaneously a piece of literary criticism, an analysis of popular culture, a political harangue, a theoretical exercise, and an ode to cigarettes.' Richard Klein is a firm postmodernist (Jacques Derrida is listed among the acknowledgments), but he is blessedly free of the pomposity and obfuscation that characterize so much of present-day critical writing. His method is elegant and playful (he is prepared to 'slide into fiction or provocation in order to avoid being boring'), but despite, or because of, this neo-dandyist approach, his intentions are never less than serious. He wants to bring 'literary criticism to bear, with a certain frivolity, on urgent social issues.'
Review, 2388 words
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