Bruce Bawer, author of Diminishing Fictions and The Middle Generation delights the reader with literary essays of the highest order. He is an engaged and stylish critic who addresses readers with intelligence and wit. This collection includes fifteen boldly evaluative and truly humane essays (all collected from "The New Criterion"). He explicates philosophic, religious, mystical, and visionary concerns in a seemingly disparate group of 20th-century writers. The highest accolades go to such novelists as William Maxwell, who, with ``conspicuous humility,'' draws us to everyday wonders. Similarly, Penelope Fitzgerald, with her ``sublime sense of the transcendent,'' portrays characters with ``quiet fortitude'' and ``a sense of duty.'' Bawer also reminds us that Flannery O'Connor's masterly stories were grounded in her traditional faith. Always measuring fiction against a sense of reality, Bawer finds many of the most celebrated writers coming up short: For all his mesmerizing brilliance, John Fowles's ``philosophical promiscuity'' leads to much mystical inanity; a clever naturalist and storyteller, Peter Matthiessen indulges in much bad faith, and considers all primitive cultures closer to God. Bawer rightly ignores the accepted wisdom about Graham Greene, and reveals the psychopathological dimension to Greene's peculiar theology. Despite their relative achievements, Baldwin, Lessing, and Updike (in the later Rabbit novels) sacrifice their narrative strengths for questionable politics and sociology. In her best work, Jean Stafford turns her tragic childhood into objective art; Harold Brodkey, on the other hand, remains mired in his own mythology, mistaking ``lexical flatulence for divine afflatus.'' These are reasoned essays from a self-described ``old-fashioned liberal humanist''. Bawer understands that ideas have consequences--and that the best art aspires to something greater than ideology. ( )