SOURCE: "The Uncynical Disillusion of Graham Greene," in The Southern Review, Vol. 27, No. 4, Autumn, 1991, pp. 946-48.

In the following review, Lebowitz discusses Greene's moral and religious vision in The Last Word and Other Stories.

Many years ago, T. S. Eliot remarked that wisdom consists largely of uncynical disillusion and that uncynical disillusion is essential to religious understanding as well. For Graham Greene, as for Eliot, detective fiction is a parable or paradigm of thoughtful disillusion. In the stories included in this thin volume, reflective of this disillusion is the tone of affective neutrality or realism that has become Greene's trademark. It is distinct from both pessimism and optimism and evokes a sense of reality which is causal and definitive rather than idealistic and emotional. Greene's realism is aseptic in that it is free of both preconceptions and strict implications. Of course, one might reply that objectivity is itself...