Michael Dirda

"I have recalled, for example, a poet whose work was exceptional; but restless because he could not write better, he remained enigmatic in his habits, coming from vague places, en route for places equally vague, seen where he was not expected and offering no explanation -- and by all this doubtless trying in some desolate way to make his verses still rarer by the rarity of his appearance."

Nothing if not introspective, John Neal is always thinking, about himself, about others, about the nature and limits of art:

"On my score I have dared quarrel with art, regretting the effectiveness of silence, and of that trickery whereby the sentence most trivial in itself is made weightiest by the assistance of plot -- as when a little girl says, 'See, the red poppy is in bloom,' saying this as an observation of no importance, merely out of pleasure with the flower's suddenness, though the reader knows from past disclosures in the text that the blooming of the poppy is to mark her own death."

From time to time, Neal's poetic sententiousness even calls to mind a similar neurotic, T.S. Eliot's Prufrock: "I have gone through the littered rooms, opened musty cupboards, and rummaged among rags with the rung of a broken chair."

Burke once wrote that had Towards a Better Life achieved a great critical or popular success, he probably would have devoted himself to fiction rather than criticism. Who wouldn't make that choice? As it stands, though, the book feels a bit like Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge , Paul Valery's Monsieur Teste or Djuna Barnes's Nightwood , claustrophobic works of great formal beauty. But it's significant that Rilke, Valery, Barnes and Burke each wrote only one extended work of fiction. It wasn't their mtier.

What about the stories? "The White Oxen" depicts a young man's lifelong search for a peacefulness represented by some placid white bulls at the zoo. The prose here is looser, conversational, with bright turns of phrase: Mrs. Huntington "was president of the Wilkinsburg Women's Euchre Club before certain things which she found out prompted her to resign."

It is, in fact, quite an appealing story, as is the surreal, dream-like "Prince Llan," which could easily be reprinted in an anthology of literary fantasy. At one point, religious wars threaten to break out between the Pontificers -- "Let each man build a bridge; If every man builds a bridge the world will have no time for vice; Build bridges" -- and the Euonymists, who hold that salvation lies in the use of the left side, pointing out "that past civilizations decayed, and that they held the left side unlucky."

Yet other stories strike me as uninviting or simply dull, including "The Anaesthetic Vision of Herone Liddell," which is described as a kind of novella-length sequel to Towards a Better Life .

I'm glad to have finally read Kenneth Burke's imaginative prose, and I would hope it would always find an appreciative, if necessarily small, public. It is appealingly (or off-puttingly) strange, it feels suspiciously autobiographical, and it's not at all easy-going or in any way natural. In other words, it's just the sort of slightly forced fiction you'd expect from a critic.

Michael Dirda is a critic for Book World. His e-mail address is mdirda@gmail.com, and his online discussion of books takes place each Wednesday at 2 p.m. on washingtonpost.com.