Volume 29, Number 13 · August 12, 1982
Keeping Up with Mr. B
By Robert Craft
Going to the Dance
by Arlene Croce
Knopf, 427 pp., $20.00; $8.95 (paper)
Winter Season: A Dancer's Journal
by Toni Bentley
Random House, 150 pp., $11.95
Among those who regularly review the arts in America today, Arlene Croce is without peer. The present collection of eighty-three pieces originally published in The New Yorker, January 1977 to August 1981 and here slightly amended, includes at least one essay of enduring value, 'News from the Muses' (on Apollo), and forty or fifty of exceptional interest. Ms. Croce's criticism is distinguished by penetration and understanding of the subject, a large and novel scope of reference, and a creative imagination. Never 'superior,' she does not display her erudition, though she has plenty of it, and to spare. An exception to Yeats's 'the best lack all conviction...,' she possesses a justified confidence in her own vision, powers of analysis, and judgments. She refers to someone as an 'in-touch' person, and is one herself, which helps to account for her lively and enjoyable blend of the literary and the vernacular: plotzed, schlockier, glitzy, laid-back, ticklability, sleaze (as a noun), jocular-jock, and—surely with no double entendre—crotch-happy.
Review, 3609 words
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