Dean deftly and often elegantly traces these women's arguments about race, politics and gender, making a kind of narrative of the ideas at play in the pages of the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the New York Review of Books, the Partisan Review and other publications ... Dean's prose is mostly plainspoken, and often persuasive. The book is consistently entertaining and often truly provocative — especially for anyone who makes or loves art or literature ... It would have been nice to see Dean include more critics of color, but the world she's writing about was even less diverse than publishing and journalism are now ... the women Dean profiles here were willing to be unpopular. That made them not only sharp, but brave.
She is as interested in the lives of its [her book's] subjects as she is in their writing, and provides a useful introduction not just to her writers’ careers but to the legendary literary establishments and institutions of the 20th century that they worked within and against ... The downside to Dean’s focus on the lives of her subjects is that their writing sometimes takes a backseat to their lives. I would have appreciated more time devoted to careful readings of West’s journalism and less to her relationship with H. G. Wells, more analysis of McCarthy’s best-selling novel The Group and less of her marriage to Edmund Wilson. When Dean does get down in the weeds and engage with what these writers actually wrote, she often does it quite well, and the book’s strength is in its accounts of debates among public intellectuals ... But Sharp is, in many ways, a missed opportunity ... Dean acknowledges in her introduction that many of the women she writes about 'came from similar backgrounds: white, and often Jewish, and middle-class.' Ultimately she is not very interested in investigating the way that these similarities affected and enabled their writing, and fair enough: the book is focused on gender rather than race, religion, or class. But the effect of this choice is that Dean repeats the same injustices she professes to despise ... Dean herself has the power to recognize [Zora Neale] Hurston — along with a number of other women writers of color — as part of this cohort, to write her into the canon from which she’s been excluded ... it is a shame that a book with so much potential and ambition, a book that seeks to define a century of American literary and intellectual history formed by women, is so narrow in its sense of that history.
...an entertaining and erudite cultural history of selected female thinkers ... Indeed, Ms. Dean herself performs the work of a public intellectual by doing justice to the substance of her subjects’ work, while also conveying—through her own wit and lively opinions—why their work matters ... Along with incisive readings of their most emblematic work, Ms. Dean skillfully encapsulates each of these women’s life stories, focusing on their mostly roundabout and bumpy paths to a public career ... There’s so much more to savor, ruminate on, learn from and, certainly, argue with in this splendid book.
Dean’s centering, or recentering, is both deeply researched and uncommonly engrossing. Indeed, Sharp’s pacing and wealth of anecdote compel one to consume the book like a novel. Many of the book’s satisfactions arise from the depictions of the incestuous, fiercely competitive beau monde these women inhabited ... particularly astute in its complex portrayal of female intellectual solidarity, friendship, and dissent ... that each woman would argue against her inclusion becomes, by the book’s end, Sharp’s primary animating force. Dean’s feat of intellectual wrangling is as impressive for what it holds together—the exquisite, creaking.
In its retelling of such histories, Sharp is a timely and acute book. You have to wonder, however, about how much work a term like 'sharpness' can be made to do, and what it distracts us from ... her implication is that real writing involves some abjuring of action in the name of ambiguity, doubt, and subtlety of opinion. I suspect some of the women in Sharp may have demurred at that. And the distinction raises the suspicion that others in this period (black writers, feminist writers) might have been 'sharp' in some of the same, and many different, ways ... There are good answers to that question, and Dean gives us some of them...But Dean is not the closest of readers, and so we don’t get much feeling for how these modes of skepticism and ambivalence are made and expressed in language.
Dean's literary bash is as stimulating and insightful as its roster of guests. She not only encapsulates their biographies and achievements with remarkable concision, but also connects the dots between them ... Like Elif Batuman's The Possessed, Sharp makes literary criticism accessible and lively. The book's topicality, combined with Dean's astute analyses of her subjects' lives and vinegar-sharp wit, should appeal to more than literary wonks ... Sharp is a wonderful celebration of some truly gutsy, brilliant women.
...deeply researched, engaging, yet tentative first book ... Dean traces their literary biographies in lucid prose, following the arcs of their careers ... yet reading Sharp I longed for some sort of interstitial tissue that might bind these women together—something more substantive than a tendency toward brilliance, lacerating judgments, and ambivalence toward feminism ... Dean doesn’t, until quite late in the book, offer much on the ways their works may speak to or past each other either stylistically or thematically ... what she offers is close to a primer ... I closed the last page of Dean’s book with the sense that she’d held herself back. I regretted her choice to stake out but a few of her own ideas in the ongoing conversation about criticism, gender, and power.
Dean writes perceptively, if sometimes in a slightly detached way, about these women's achievements and failures, the sorts of things they wished they could have done, and their blind spots ... Occasionally, Dean withholds her own judgment a little too much; it's hard to read about all these opinionated women and their controversies without wanting the author to come down on one side or another. But for the most part, Sharp is an insightful book that works well to introduce its subjects to newcomers while containing enough of Dean's analysis to be interesting to readers already familiar with them.
A virtue of her book is that it shows how each woman, by wielding a pen as if it were a scalpel or a scimitar, confounded the gender norm of niceness and placed her analytical prowess front and center ... For readers unfamiliar with the work of these women, Sharp should be eye-opening. Dean traverses the intellectual landscape of the 20th century at an easy gallop ... For those who have lived with these writers for years, Dean can come up short ... Dean’s own writing, direct and lively, can get too loosely conversational — too wordy and imprecise. Her chatty approach to these formidable women makes them seem accessible, and that’s a good thing. But a blue pencil is as strong as a sword, and more cut and thrust would have made this book sharper.
In a happy case of it takes one to know one, Michelle Dean has delivered a penetrating book about penetrating American writers ... Dean serves one incisive sentence after another ... At the same time, Dean respects her literary foremothers enough to examine the foibles, difficulties and weaknesses underneath those fearsome personas.
It is no faint praise to say that Michelle Dean’s Sharp reminds me of the biography collections I loved as a child. Books with titles like Great Women in History and Great Jewish Women introduced me to historical figures I remember to this day ... her persistent focus on reviews, both written and received, suggests a history of reviewing trying to claw its way out of these pages ... Dean has a gift for summarizing eras, issues, texts, and relationships, from Martin Heidegger’s Nazi period, West’s psychoanalysis of Yugoslavia, and Arendt’s influential account of totalitarianism, to the evolution of The New Yorker and Partisan Review, Ephron’s career at the Post, and Malcolm’s furniture columns. However, she often lets her observations and the connections she uncovers go relatively unexamined.
Sharp is a beautifully written, well-researched and much needed correction to criticism's historical record ... Perhaps most remarkable about this book is its methodology. Sharp is at once a work of flash biography, textual analysis and cultural history. In the hands of a lesser writer, a treatise with this many layers could have collapsed into a disorganized heap. But Dean, an award-winning critic in her own right, navigates from one layer to the next with grace. It amazes to think that this is her first book.
Dean knows exactly how best to sum up her subject’s particular talents ... One of the book’s highlights is the fascinating analysis of how the friendship between Hannah Arendt, 'dense with complicated thought', and Mary McCarthy, 'slicing and elegant', influenced the work each produced ... But Sharp is not, Dean is quick to point out, an attempt to establish a reductive notion of “sisterhood,” not least because each woman’s feminism differed so drastically ... Sometimes challenging but endlessly absorbing, Sharp’s only shortcoming is the uniformity of its subjects: all white, all middle-class ... History, of course, bears some accountability here, and perhaps it is the case that Dean decided she wasn’t best-placed to tell the stories of what would be different — undoubtedly harder — struggles, but it still seems like an oversight.
As a female writer who cut her intellectual teeth reading the work of these women in magazines and between book covers, I never considered that these writers were not in the center of our shared intellectual history. But if anyone needed convincing, this work of readable scholarship should do it. Dean proves a sharp writer and critic herself.
Dear God, what a sexy reading list Michelle Dean has put together. Never have I seen so clearly that my dream version of myself – the person I always assumed I would grow up to be – is a drily witty, slightly abrasive woman in a black turtleneck whose end table is stacked high with yellowed paperback copies of lesser-known works by Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Hannah Arendt ... Dean does an excellent job of moving swiftly through her list of writers, culling from these 'women who made an art of having an opinion' quotations, jokes and arguments most likely to appeal to the literary women of 2018 ... My sense is that Dean originally planned to write about women who worked as cultural critics – reviewers of literature, drama and film – but that as she got swept up in her research, she expanded her definition of a “critic” so widely that the word no longer functioned as a useful criterion for inclusion, and so she was forced to cast about for another, without quite landing on one that satisfies ... By limiting her book to writers who fit a certain demographic profile, she is not simply reporting on the whitewashed state of literary criticism; she is perpetuating it.
With the word ferocity appearing with satisfying frequency, Dean presents shrewd, discerning, fresh, and crisply composed interpretations of the temperaments, experiences, and sophisticated trailblazing works of these gutsy and transformative thinkers.
Dean’s book is far from perfect. She skims where she should dive; her tone is unvarying, with the somewhat dispiriting result that her essays are considerably less distinctive than the women they portray ... Above all, I’m resistant to the way she struggles with what she clearly regards as her subjects’ disappointing attitude to feminism. It’s not only, as she notes herself, a question of historical context. Like so many others right now, she seems to have forgotten that, even five years ago, you would have been hard pressed to get many, if not most, women in the public eye to call themselves feminists. Nevertheless, this is a great and worthy project: a primer for those for whom these names are new; a sustaining reminder for those already familiar with them. You put it down feeling steadier, more determined.
The apt title of Michelle Dean's book is Sharp. Is it ever ... I also can't tell you how joyous it is to read Dean's Sharp and to encounter together the life and times and works of Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Renata Adler, Joan Didion and -- on a slightly higher plane, Rebecca West and Hannah Arendt ... I have absolutely no complaint to make about any feminist reader who wants to claim Sharp as a marvelous exemplar of a book that probably should have been written years ago.
Combining biography and criticism, Dean is often shrewd in her judgments. If early chapters on Parker and English journalist Rebecca West feel thin, Dean does show that these figures were nobody’s victims. The book picks up steam with Arendt and the debate over totalitarianism and the Holocaust ... Dean is sometimes at pains to place these figures in relationship to the feminist movement of the late 1960s and early ’70s ... The strength of Sharp lies in the way Dean stands up for the 'individual personality' of each of her subjects. And they were individuals, all.
A well-researched and highly readable book that combines biography, literary criticism, and cultural history, Sharp celebrates pioneering writers who managed to make their voices heard, despite the culture of sexism and misogyny that actively worked to keep them silent ... While there is a brief section of the book devoted to Hurston and her writing, little attention is paid to other 20th century women writers who were not white, cisgender, and middle class. If anything, this flaw in the book only further demonstrates the utter lack of diversity in America’s artistic and intellectual culture, not just in the people who are creating it, but also in the people who are criticizing it.
At times Michelle Dean's Sharp feels like a zany game of Twister ... Yet her argument might appear to be right there in the subtitle – The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion – it remains frustratingly vague ... By including so many writers about whom so much is already widely known, Dean has set herself an impossible task – there’s just not enough room to say much that’s new in the breathless sweep from one woman to another, and what links them is often tenuous, except in the case of those who were friends (such as Arendt and Mary McCarthy, whose relationship is given a separate chapter) ... In the end, even though Dean has chosen her women precisely for their exceptional qualities, the form of the book tends to imply once more that female writers must occupy the same category. It’s always fun to read about these women as social and professional creatures – where they published, whom they seduced, how they treated one another – but perhaps inevitably, given how little many of their intellectual projects had in common, Dean doesn’t always pay enough attention to what each one was saying, and how she said it.
Few readers could fail to be impressed by both the research behind and readability of this first book by Dean ... The book has a few glitches—a short section on Zora Neale Hurston, for example, doesn’t quite mesh with the rest. Taken as a whole, however, this is a stunning and highly accessible introduction to a group of important writers.
Dean reveals intriguing connections that link most, if not all, of them together ... Unfortunately, Dean often discusses these female authors’ writerly independence in relation to the men that occupied important places in their lives, an odd choice in a book of this nature. Still, the author presents engaging portraits of brilliant minds.
