Elemental echoes

IT’S hard to read Charles Baxter’s “The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot” (Graywolf: 180 pp., $12 paper) or Donald Revell’s “The Art of Attention: A Poet’s Eye” (Graywolf: 172 pp., $12 paper) -- the first two volumes in Graywolf Press’ “Art of” series of literary craft books -- without thinking of William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. Strunk and White, after all, essentially invented the modern craft book with “The Elements of Style,” the classic that in 100 concise pages lays out an exegesis not only of writing’s mechanics but also of its art.

“The Elements of Style” inhabits “The Art of Subtext” and “The Art of Attention” like an animating spirit -- a subtext, as Baxter might say. Both new books do what their predecessor did: They take intangible matters of craft and render them concretely -- Baxter by focusing on such issues as staging and scene construction and Revell by framing poetry as an art of seeing, in which detail is the key to everything.

Each invokes examples (literary and otherwise) to suggest how craft facilitates literature’s process of interior excavation, an exploration of identity. “Attention is a question of entirety, of being wholly present,” Revell writes. “And so a poem has nothing to do with picking and choosing, with the mot juste and reflection in tranquillity. It is a plain record of one’s entire presence.”

Still, despite such moments of acuity, neither “The Art of Attention” nor “The Art of Subtext” ever manages to get out from underneath the shadow cast by Strunk and White. Partly, this has to do with the earnestness both Baxter and Revell bring to their writing, which makes these books less playful than they ought to be. But more to the point, it’s that even the best stuff here is reminiscent of material we’ve already seen before -- beginning in the pages of “The Elements of Style.”

-- David L. Ulin