...[a] smart, agile, good-natured account of one of America’s most famous literary brawls ... On one level this is a farce. On another, which Beam wisely allows to suggest itself in this knowledgeable and readable volume, it is a sort of minor tragedy — two men, driven to literature at least in part by feelings of insecurity and loss, found and then lost to each other in that same refuge. The Feud brilliantly contours both Wilson and Nabokov in their human rage against each other, places them finely in their milieu, and ultimately elicits in us what each, so profoundly prideful, would have least wished to have from posterity: pity.
The considerable pleasure of The Feud derives from the agile way Beam shows how those differences manifested themselves in the first two decades of the friendship and then erupted into enmity in the third. Beam wears his learning lightly. He has a keen sense of the absurd and is mischievous but not malicious in exposing the foibles of these frenemies ... Beam addresses all these issues and has great fun with them. But his book mostly leaves you asking yourself how prideful and pig headed even the smartest men can be.
...a deliciously smart read ... The Feud is also a spellbinding — and sobering — cautionary tale about how ego and envy can destroy even the most brilliant friendship ... Beam deftly rounds up all the ammunition for their eventual shootout. Nabokov, firing with anything but neutrality from Switzerland, where he retreated after the success of Lolita, does not come off well ... Beam, a witty, concise writer with a nose for sharp zingers and an ability to extract highlights without compromising substance, addresses his reader genially.
Beam’s own account is unfailingly amusing, not overlong, winningly useless and not entirely free of spite for Wilson, who, based on the evidence Beam provides, seems to deserve it ... Implicitly, The Feud celebrates the idiosyncrasy of literature rather than its monumentality, and the charismatic Nabokov would seem the perfect embodiment of idiosyncrasy ... It’s not surprising that Nabokov’s reputation has endured while Wilson’s has faded. Personality sells. But it would be a shame if The Feud, so brisk and entertaining, provided a reader’s only glimpse of one of America’s best critics.
Beam tries valiantly to examine such a relationship in his new book, The Feud, about the critic Edmund Wilson and the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, but he seems thwarted by his own congenial evenhandedness that avoids the dark clouds and hidden spaces that can fuel intense friendships ... Unfortunately, Beam struggles to integrate these details into an engaging narrative about their friendship and its demise. He seems averse to the psychological inquiry required to penetrate the turbulence that engulfed both men ... Beam’s assessments are intellectually plausible, but the reader can’t help but feel that the keenest insights have been left unexplored.
The arc of the relationship is more complicated than can be described in this review — which is why it warrants a book of this nature, a short but comprehensive descent into the intertwining private and public lives of two lovable egomaniacs.
[Beam] never quite stops laughing through the 200 pages that follow, which is exactly what makes The Feud such wicked fun ... The most sublime and insightful words, more often than not, emerge from decidedly ignoble creatures. You could wring your hands over the misguided senselessness of it all, but it’s saner to follow Beam’s lead and learn to laugh.
The Feud is breezily told but Beam has spent so much time in the combatants’ company that he’s assumed both men’s imperiousness ... The Feud recalls a golden age when giants roamed the landscape. Beam’s account is most interesting as a study in vanity, a demonstration that one’s accomplishments don’t guarantee perspective or kindness.
Within the large category of books that should have been magazine articles, Alex Beam’s The Feud is one of the more enjoyable ... Beam is a deft and droll narrator of all the sordid details, and he does capture the folly and vanity that characterize public literary feuds. But devoting an entire book to the subject, even a short one, feels voyeuristic and trivial. Some things are best forgotten.
