‘The End of Solitude’ 
By William Deresiewicz
Henry Holt and Co., 320 Pages

William Deresiewicz’s “The End of Solitude” is an essay collection that doubles as a battering ram trained against the cultural idols of the moment. Mr. Deresiewicz, one of whose subjects is his loss of faith, shows himself an iconoclast in fine form. His Baals — social media and elite universities most prominently — have met their polemical match. 

While the more than 40 essays in this collection were published between 2009 and this year, the older ones — references to MySpace and Blackberrys aside — are evergreens, fully in season in the present. Pieces on cultural titans like the Harolds — Rosenberg and Bloom — along with Alfred Kazin and Clive James land with equal pleasure whether you’ve read deeply in these worthies or are looking for a trusted guide.    

Mr. Deresiewicz, who once taught English Literature at Yale only to leave the academy to make his career as a freelance critic, first came to widespread attention for “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” a 2008 polemic for the American Scholar — reprinted in this volume — that argued the products of Harvard, Yale, and their ilk have “many achievements but little experience, great success but no vision.”

That piece and the book that followed, entitled “Excellent Sheep,” marked Mr. Deresiewicz as a heretic of the prestigious environs in which he spent decades, and which he lambasts as making their students “incapable of talking to people who aren’t exactly like you.” They alienate you, he laments, from “very much of the human.” Mr. Deresiewicz, an expert in Jane Austen, recalls being unable to communicate with his plumber.    

While much of Mr. Deresiewicz’s ire is aimed at the hunt for prestige, relentless careerism, and box checking that has consumed the Ivy League, he also notes the “flesh-eating bacterium of political correctness,” which have rendered selective private universities devoted to “an extreme version of the belief system of the liberal elite.” He tells the Sun that “wokeness provides the moral context” that the college rat race banished.

Mr. Deresiewicz, who tells the Sun that he is a man of the “progressive Bernie Sanders left,” nevertheless sees in wokeness “the liberal brain attacking itself” and precluding the “ability to think.” Describing wokeness as a “fig leaf” for the “New York and Ivy League status derby,” Mr. Deresiewicz knits the “connection between the religion of success and the religion of political correctness.”       

No tech utopian, Mr. Deresiewicz tells the Sun that he can feel the relentlessness of the smartphone “rotting my brain,” and writes that the rise of the online self has occluded young people’s “sense of their own depths, and of the value of keeping them hidden.”  He is a champion of “slowing down and concentrating” and “gathering yourself into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed into a cloud of electronic and social output.”  

“To be an individual,” Mr. Deresiewicz argues, “takes a constant effort.” Dipping into intellectual history, he argues for a vision of individuality “developed in solitude, in fearless dialogue, by reading, through education as the nurturing of souls; embodied in original art and independent thought.” If that ideal sounds far away, Mr. Deresiewicz believes that “we can find our equilibrium” in respect of the tools that are our liberators and jailers. 

If, as Mr. Deresiewicz writes, “we are discarding” the riches of culture and history “as fast as we can” in a frenzy of scrolling, swiping, and streaming, the essays in the “Letters” section of this volume are acts of eloquent ingathering.  Kazin wrote “with his whole being, from a ferocious intensity of hunger and joy,” to “pick a fight with the world.” Of Rosenberg; “he ran with no packs” and “kept faith with his estrangement.” The same could be said of Mr. Deresiewicz.

The essay on literary colossus Harold Bloom, whom he diagnoses with a “logorrhea so Niagaran even death will be hard put to shut it off,”  is a rip-roaring romp that encompasses “fifty years of brilliance, boldness, bombast, bathos, and bullshit.” Both employed at the Yale English department, Mr. Deresiewicz never met Bloom, a ratio of familiarity to objectivity that pays off in a riff comparing the author of “The Anxiety of Influence” to Kurtz, the wild man of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.”

Only one essay is wanting. Entitled “Day of Atonement,” it is a dyspeptic reflection on the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Oslo Accords. It jabs that “the proponents of Greater Israel have always believed that they can outsmart the rest of the world” and dilates on Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “bottomless cynicism.” Mr. Deresiewicz urges “repentance.” It could be replied that Israel, like King Lear, is more “sinned against than sinning.”

This reviewer remembers, while still an undergraduate at Harvard more than a decade ago, Mr. Deresiewicz appearing at one of the most cavernous venues on campus. It was packed, with some of the university’s academic celebrities on the stage to joust with this gadfly who had issued such withering scorn towards everyone who crowded under that roof. For a night, pretension and smugness were held to account. I couldn’t help but clap.