Unsent Letters: Irreverent Notes From a Literary Life (review)
to the density of conversation that has grown around them. It is the possibUities of the myth of the hero in the modern age that interests Spivey, that and the shamanistic voice. And, in a book called Beyond Modernism, the two recent figures for whom he offers an analysis are Bellow and Walker Percy. For a work that seeks to revive myth criticism and extend it to contemporary letters, it is astoundingly thin. Two books do not resolve a question, and so the question remains, an intriguing one, I think, because it has two parts. One asks whether Jung got it right, whether, from time to time, we will all be obliged to come back to him because he found the truth, the nature of our humanity and necessarily the nature of our literature. The other is whether he offered attractive structures, intriguing constructs, neither true nor false but useful, ways of discoursing on the literary imagination by reference to a system imagined to be both primitive and universal.