Professor Enright apologetically suggests that some of the short articles and reviews he has collected in [Conspirators and Poets] could 'scarcely be called "literary criticism."' By the standard he himself set in the best essays in his previous collection, The Apothecary's Shop, that may be true. But the apology can be read in more ways than one. When he writes in one of these pieces that the symbolism in John Updike's novels is

all very neat and contrived, as if some sophisticate is amusedly performing for a psychiatrist of low intelligence

—that, we can't help agreeing, is certainly not literary criticism of the kind we have become most familiar with. It is too swift, too witty, too decisive; it uses everyday experience to effect, in a manner carefully avoided by most writers on contemporary literature in the professional academic reviews. The fact is—to paraphrase the old...