In "Time of Need," the author is saying, like a teacher to a lazy student, "I'm afraid that's a very superficial reading." And he goes on to prove it. Examining Camus, Hemingway, Faulkner, Kafka, Joyce, Hesse and even E. M. Forster—as well as Giacometti, Henry Moore, Picasso and others in the visual arts—he shows them moving beyond rational meaning, which is not the business of art, toward myth, mysteries and perspectives even deeper than those in de Chirico's paintings.

For all the pages that have been written about them, his interpretations of these artists are startlingly fresh and provocative….

With Beckett, [Barrett] has outdone himself—and perhaps the reader as well. Beckett is seen as a "post-neurosis" writer, one whose art may have developed to such a point that it becomes almost self-defeating. He has passed through so many stages of renunciation that we cannot believe...