SOURCE: Glasser, Perry. “Purer Than Everything Else.” North American Review 274, no. 3 (September 1989): 69-72.

In the following excerpt, Glasser chronicles The Watch as a promising collection by a young author, but criticizes the stories for their predictability and superficiality.

Writers alternately understand themselves to be engaged in a futile, irrelevant dalliance, or they understand themselves to be engaged in the most vital and necessary of human activities: the articulation, formation and preservation of the human spirit.

That's if they think about themselves at all—which probably shouldn't be so very often.

If the first political act of the writer is mastery of the self, the discipline that applies buttocks to chair, then the second act is to convince someone—anyone—that this stuff is worth reading. It's easy to get readers if one resorts to emotional blackmail, a political act most of us learn at our mother's knee. All...