SOURCE: O'Brien, Conor Cruise. “Trop de Zèle.” New York Review of Books 33, no. 15 (9 October 1986): 11-14.

In the following review, O'Brien utilizes sarcasm and irony to debunk several of Podhoretz's central arguments in The Bloody Crossroads: Where Literature and Politics Meet.

The title and subtitle together make up a quotation from Lionel Trilling. [The Bloody Crossroads: Where Literature and Politics Meet] is made up of nine essays: on the writers of The God That Failed group; on Camus and his critics; on Orwell; on F. R. Leavis; on Henry Adams; on “The Adversary Culture and the New Class”; on Kissinger, on Milan Kundera, and on Solzhenitsyn. All of the essays contain—though in varying proportions—both literary criticism and political comment. In his introduction, Mr. Podhoretz reasserts his belief “that it is possible for a critic to speak openly from a particular political perspective and to make political...