"The best literary critic in America is Adam Kirsch." Discuss

Adam Kirsch is the best young literary critic in America. His essays show why American literary journalism is so much better than it is here. The best American reviewers, Kirsch among them, are not afraid of being highbrow, of European literature and, above all, of Jews.

“Adam Kirsch,” wrote James Wood, “is the most exciting, the most serious, and the most courageous young poet-critic in America.” He burst onto the American literary scene about a decade ago, reviewing for Leon Wieseltier at the New Republic, and though he isn’t that well known here, his reviews appear regularly in in the States in the New Republic, New Yorker and New York Review of Books.

His range is tremendous, writing on subjects from Heidegger and Plato to Bellow, Joseph Roth and William Carlos Williams. Some of these are among the most incisive and intelligent critical essays published in recent years. His latest book of essays, Who Wants to Be a Jewish Writer? (published last year) includes essays on Seamus Heaney, Stefan Zweig and one of the best reviews of Robert Alter’s great translation of The Psalms.

What marks him out is his ability to put a writer in context and explore what is at stake in their work. Unusually for a critic of his generation he is uninterested in theory or the orthodoxies of academic criticism. What is immediately striking about Kirsch’s writing is his non-academic, personal style. There is no jargon. He writes clearly, for the general reader. He is wonderfully old-fashioned, going his own way. It’s hard to think of another young critic who would write a book like Why Trilling Matters (two years ago he also edited a book of Trilling’s letters).

His two great passions are modern American poetry and Jewish literature and religion. He published his first collection of poems in 2002 and his 2005 book, The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets, looked at post-war American poetry, from Delmore Schwartz and Sylvia Plath to Berryman and Lowell. The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry followed soon after.

But his greatest subject is Jewish writing, from the Jewish Bible to modern literature. “Modern Jewish literature,” he wrote recently, “is generally on uneasy terms with traditional belief and practice.” When he writes about Jewish literature, though, he doesn’t confine himself to spiritual or theological questions. What interests him are the relations between modern Jewish writers writing in a secular society and Jewish tradition. “Much of my work as a critic over the past ten years,” he wrote recently, “has been devoted to understanding what it really means to be a Jew and a Jewish writer in such a [secular] culture.”

His best essays on Jewish writers include, “Who Wants to Be a Jewish Writer?” and “Is There Such a Thing as Jewish Literature?” both published in his recent book of essays. “Is there some quality or essence,” he asks, “that unites different forms of literary expression by Jews, across barriers of time and language and culture?” The answer, he writes, lies in the distinctive way Jews relate to texts and tradition, going back to the Talmud. “Jewish literature is what happens every time a writer tries to make a place for himself or herself in that ancient lineage.”

Perhaps this has something to do with the way he distances himself from an earlier post-war generation of Jewish writers, including Bellow and Roth, writers who were energised by the clash between a Jewish past and an American future. “Among Jewish writers my age,” he says, “I think there is less tension and rebellion, and more desire to preserve Jewishness and Judaism.” For Kirsch this isn’t primarily about whether writers talk about the Holocaust, Israel or Yiddish. It’s about their relationship to Jewish tradition and the great Jewish texts.

Adam Kirsch should be better known here. Next week he will be making two appearances at Jewish Book Week at Kings Place in London, discussing Jewish writing with Howard Jacobson and Eva Hoffman on Sunday and then in conversation about his latest book on Monday evening. It is a great opportunity to hear a fascinating critic, one of the best of his generation.