Books on Writing

My two favorite books of 2007 could not have less in common on the surface. Yet "Matters of Honor" (Knopf, 320 pages, $24.95), a novel by Louis Begley, and "Ambition and Survival" (Copper Canyon, 249 pages, $18), a prose collection by Christian Wiman, converge in ways that suggest how little the outward tokens of "identity" have to do with a writer's true self. Mr. Begley, a Jewish Holocaust survivor in his 70s, and Mr. Wiman, born to a Southern Baptist family in Texas in the 1960s, are united by their devotion to literary art, and their ironic awareness of the cost that devotion exacts. Perhaps it is because these two books are so morally and intellectually strenuous — though never recondite, and always absorbing — that they were greeted with resistance by many reviewers.

"Matters of Honor" is Mr. Begley's most significant novel since "Wartime Lies," his fictionalized account of his experiences in Nazi-occupied Poland. Henry White, the central figure in the new novel, shares that history with Maciek, the hero of the earlier one; they are both Mr. Begley's veiled surrogates. "Matters of Honor" is the novel that finally explains how that terrorized immigrant child evolved into the kind of character Mr. Begley has treated in most of his fiction — sophisticated, cold, rather sinister men such as Mistler of "Mistler's Exit" and Schmidt of "About Schmidt." As we see Henry negotiate the mazes of American power, and sacrifice more and more of himself on the path to success, we come to realize that Henry's way of coping with the Holocaust is, in fact, the very wound that it inflicts on him. Mr. Begley is always a deliberate, reserved writer — like Thomas Mann, he only shows himself with calculated indirection. But that disclosure, for a reader attuned to Mr. Begley's ironies, is devastatingly moving.

"Ambition and Survival" is the first book of prose by Mr. Wiman, the poet who is editor of Poetry magazine. Readers of the magazine know Mr. Wiman as one of the best critics at work today, and the book collects his penetrating essays on poets from Milton to Heaney. But what raises "Ambition and Survival" beyond criticism to become a first-class spiritual memoir is the way Mr. Wiman lays bare the inner sources of a poet's need to shape experience in words. In his writing and his reading, what Mr. Wiman values most, he says, is "some sense that a fully inhabited life — be it brief, or narrow, or in some fundamental way thwarted — has been suffered into form." In that resonant phrase, Mr. Wiman manages to encapsulate a genuine poet's experience of the world.