Trilling's Novel

Over at TNR, Cynthia Ozick considers Lionel Trilling's unfinished novel, soon to be published by Columbia University Press and discussed on this blog here:

The breadth of Trilling's renown can hardly be understood today. He was a professor of literature at a major university who was at the same time a "figure" (a term he honored) in the culture at large. And what was he really? An essayist; and it is tempting to say, given the expository clamor of the moment--its short views and skimpy topicality--merely an essayist. Yet no present-day magazine writer or blogger or reviewer or critic can aspire to what Trilling as essayist encompassed: his aim was nothing less than to define, and refine, civilization. He meant not only to comment or discriminate or analyze or judge, but to "stand for something." And at his death in 1975 at the age of seventy, what he finally stood for was a scrupulously perceptive and sinuously nuanced interpretation of the moral life as expressed in the literature of the West. If the idea of sage could be applied to any American essayist after Emerson, that is what he had become. A more modulated perspective would settle for Trilling as the most discerning, the most reasoned, and certainly the most celebrated, critic of his time.