Describe the character of the adult Anders. Why do you think Wolff choseto make him a book critic?
What will be an ideal response?
- He is cold, smug, and condescending, determined to find fault with everything and everyone. So all-encompassing is his scorn that he mocks the woman ahead of him in the line for expressing the very same annoyance that he is feeling. Such pervasive contempt (which some might interpret, at least in part, as unconscious self-contempt) may be a way of persuading himself of his own superiority—though, as another character wisely observes of the morbidly jaded Pococurante in Voltaire’s Candide, “The best stomachs are not those that refuse all meat.”
Anders is not just a book critic, but one who is “known for the weary, elegant savagery with which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed” (par. 1). Spending all of his working hours in passing judgment on others, with constant exposure to the trite, the inept, the inadequate, may have bred in him a gradual deadening of the capacity to respond with freshness and enthusiasm (“He did not remember when he began to regard the heap of books on his desk with boredom and dread, or when he grew angry at writers for writing them” [par. 35]). Also, like any widely noticed author, Wolff has no doubt been displeased by some of the assessments of his work, and he is amusing himself by taking a shot at the kind of reviewer whose first instinct is to point out what is wrong with everything.
Language Arts & World Languages
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Language Arts & World Languages
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Language Arts & World Languages
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Language Arts & World Languages