SOURCE: Alvarez, A. “Critic on the Hearth.” Spectator, no. 7150 (9 July 1965): 52-3.

In the following review, Alvarez acknowledges the sharpness of the essays collected in Doings and Undoings but stresses that he is uncomfortable with Podhoretz's evolution from a literary critic to a moral sentinel.

In one of the most intriguing essays in an immensely intriguing collection [Doings and Undoings: The Fifties and after in American Writing] Norman Podhoretz sets out to defend “The Article as Art”:

Why should the magazine article, of all things, have become so important and fertile a genre in our day? Why have so many writers … found it possible to move around more freely and creatively within it than within fiction or poetry?

His slightly anti-climactic answer is that the article chimes with our taste for the functional, as in architecture or painting. But clearly there is more to it than that. The article...