MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksDespite the efforts of the collection’s editor, Noah Isenberg, On Assignment is not a cohesive volume. Attempts to draw connections between Wilder’s writing and his later filmmaking—through a series of brief film reviews and pieces from film sets—are not convincing. And his decision to cut pieces deemed \'inaccessible to an Anglo-American audience\' reduces the book’s historical interest, leaving little detail about Weimar Germany or Austria a decade before the Anschluss. But in Wilder’s prose, Isenberg and translator Shelley Frisch have found some salvation. There’s a pitter-patter in Wilder’s writing, as if, in a fit of brilliant indolence, he hasn’t had time to transform his staccato notes into an actual story ... Wilder revels in turns of phrase, in bits of wit and irreverence. His passion for words compensates for the occasionally implausible narratives he concocts, the just-a-bit-too-perfect quotes from the important people he happens to meet ... There are three things On Assignment could have been: it might have been a work of primarily biographical interest ... a portrait of cities caught between two cataclysms ... And it might have been a study in journalism, a slice of that epoch of feature writing in which quotes were half-invented, and stories aimed for the feeling of accuracy rather than actual accuracy. This is where Isenberg has most succeeded as an editor, perhaps unintentionally. Wilder’s reporting raises questions of plausibility, and he usually appears woefully underprepared for his interviews.
