Other Walk [Paperback]

Birkerts is one of the country's best literary critics, and he has been for a long time. If you know his other books -- "American Energies," "An Artificial Wilderness," and "The Gutenberg Elegies" for three -- you know that he combines real critical rigor with an almost old-fashioned humanistic stance that is extremely valuable in a time flooded with literary "theory." He is also an excellent prose writer, as a glance inside any of his books will show.

This one is something different -- rarer and better, even, than his criticism -- super-compressed and finely wrought miniatures on different topics, each one different, each one complete in itself and delicious. They combine fine observation, wit, rue, and deep emotion wedded to an essential reserve. The writing is always sharp, and sometimes it is stunningly good. Each one is a separate little adventure in which he uses some object or incident as a point of departure for an extended riff that always leads somewhere interesting.

If you know essays, you'll be reminded of Montaigne, who seems to be Birkerts' model, but Birkerts has brought off something all his own, and very special here -- if you are checking him out in the first place, you probably have a taste for sharp writing, irony, and intelligence. This book delivers all of that and more. I think it is Birkerts' best book yet. Highly recommended.

I truly wish I liked or could recommend this book, but even as I am still sludging my way through it, my overwhelming response is that the book is self-indulgent and stylistically poorly written.

I read Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies in the 1990's and was very impressed, so it was with great excitement that I started The Other Walk.

I have been incredibly disappointed. While the overall theme of the book seems to be time and memories, certainly an important topic, the series of short essays seldom make a point within themselves. They seem more like rough drafts for longer, more developed essays. Much of the writing is rambling, with too many interjections within dashes, asides that go on for whole paragraphs, and parenthetical digressions, all of which are unnecessary and make for very sloppy writing. It's clear that he chose this writing style, and it hurts rather than helps him.

Birkerts comes across in his own book as a cold and egotistical person, more interested in himself than in anyone else, incapable of much real feeling. And yet time and memories are things we usually associate with feelings. It is very hard - in my opinion, impossible - to care about him as a person, given the way he writes about himself and his experiences and opinions. There is no heart in the book, no warmth in his style of writing, and he seems stuck in a bohemian past while having a mid-life crisis he doesn't ever really acknowledge. I simply could not relate to him.

The Other Walk seems to be much ado about nothing. Had I written this book, no one would have published it. It's Birkerts' reputation that got this into print, and it's certainly undermined my opinion of him both as a writer and as a human being. Even as I am finishing this book, I have to ask myself why he wrote it and why the reading public should care.

This writer sells himself as a literary critic, but I see very little of the literary in this collection of essays. Rather there is in this volume an assemblage of disparate images, thoughts and tattered bits of verbiage that are strung along to maintain a page count. Author Sven Birkerts hasn't a way with words, struggles to make a tangential connection to his "Grandfather's Painting," it is nearly laughable, and is entirely better suited away from the pen and paper. He is natural born to the editor's highlight marker.

Chris Roberts