NONFICTION - Aug. 30, 1987

AN ARTIFICIAL WILDERNESS: ESSAYS ON 20TH CENTURY LITERATURE by Sven Birkerts (Morrow: $18.95; 416 pp.). This is too cruel, but I will do it. One of the books reviewed in this collection of Sven Birkert’s book reviews and other short essays is a similar collection by George Steiner, of which Birkerts writes: “When I heard that Oxford University Press was issuing ‘George Steiner: A Reader’ (1984), I was distressed to see that venerable old house giving in to the bonbon sampler trend--and shocked to find Steiner a party to the deed.” Obviously, Birkerts has been party to just such a deed at Morrow; but readers who have been reading and enjoying his work here and there without knowing anything about him will not be distressed.

Birkerts, we learn in the introduction to the collection, fell in love with literature in an Ann Arbor bookstore, not in the classroom. He worked in that and other bookstores for years, defining his “field” as he went. And where he went, before too long, was to contemporary literature written outside the United States. The result, as the years passed, was that he became an unofficial or informal authority on European, Russian and Latin American literature, widely published and eventually invited to teach at Harvard University.

World Literature is not really the name of any academic field, but so much the better for the unpretentious, undefensive style of a critic who can admit what he does not know because there is nothing that--according to some diploma or catalogue title--he must know. Birkerts’ motto, as spoken of literature, might be the bookstore clerk’s: “I just work here.” But of course he has worked there long enough and with such a happy freedom that by now he knows not just how to answer your question but how to correct it.

I think of Birkerts, who won the National Book Critics Circle criticism prize in 1986, as some combination of critic laureate and patron saint for booksellers. For reviewers, his range is such that his book might claim a spot on the shelf almost as a reference work. But for those in the trade, his book is a proof of how high their calling truly is. It should be stocked and displayed accordingly.