SOURCE: “Critical Overdose,” in Washington Post Book World, May 18, 1997, p. 7.

In the following review, Mehlman offers an unfavorable assessment of Benjamin's Crossing.

Walter Benjamin, the subject of Jay Parini’s new novel [Benjamin's Crossing], is as close as the self-styled iconoclasts of the literary-theory crowd have come to producing a genuine icon. A delver into the devious autonomy of signs, Benjamin, a German Jew, wrote his major work—on the arcane subject of German tragic drama—in the 1920s. Baroque “allegory” was the touchstone of semiotic perversity in that work, “intercepting” images of plenitude, waking readers from their every aesthetic lull. It was perhaps inevitable that Benjamin, a brooding man of genuine brilliance, would end up as something of a patron saint of deconstruction.

His posthumous aura, however, was a function of a very different “interception”—or rather of its conflation with the case just mentioned. This second...