Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible

by Robert Alter

How the King James Bible has influenced the style of the American novel from Melville to Cormac McCarthy

The simple yet grand language of the King James Bible has pervaded American culture from the beginning―and its powerful eloquence continues to be felt even today. In this book, acclaimed biblical translator and literary critic Robert Alter traces some of the fascinating ways that American novelists―from Melville, Hemingway, and Faulkner to Bellow, Marilynne Robinson, and Cormac McCarthy―have drawn on the rich stylistic resources of the canonical English Bible to fashion their own strongly resonant styles and distinctive visions of reality. Showing the radically different manners in which the words, idioms, syntax, and cadences of this Bible are woven into Moby-Dick, Absalom, Absalom!, The Sun Also Rises, Seize the Day, Gilead, and The Road , Alter reveals the wide variety of stylistic and imaginative possibilities that American novelists have found in Scripture. At the same time, Alter demonstrates the importance of looking closely at the style of literary works, making the case that style is not merely an aesthetic phenomenon but is the very medium through which writers conceive their worlds.

Genres: Religion, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, History, Literature, Writing, Christianity

208 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Robert Bernard Alter is an American professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967, and has published many acclaimed works on the Bible, literary modernism, and contemporary Hebrew literature.

Reviews

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is, at once, an examination of modes of Biblical style in American literature and a rallying-cry for a return to close reading in the study and criticism of literature. Alter maintains that literature departments have abandoned all attention to the idiosyncratic use of language and rhetoric by individual creators in favor of a an endless, politically driven, post-structuralist rehashing of Derrida and Foucault. Most graduate students of literature, Alter claims, might as well be reading novels in translation, for all of the attention given to the actual language from which they are constructed. And style, he says, is more than window-dressing. It is ultimately the means of perception. Writing is a cognitive as well as a communicative act.
Elegantly written and, so far as I'm concerned, couldn't be more right.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you had to bet your entrance into Heaven (assuming you believe in such a place) on the answer, what would you say is most important word in the Bible? (Hint: it’s not a noun, proper or otherwise, not a verb, object, or adjective.) If you said “and” – that’s right, a little old conjunction – then book your soul for a first-class ticket to the sunny side of whatever awaits us after the last spadeful of dirt has thumped the coffin lid. If you said “parataxis,” then you’d probably get a 100 years or so in Purgatory for pious pedantry. But don’t worry, for even if you’re not in the habit of tossing around semantic alms like “heteroglossia” and “polyphony” and “integument” and “metonymy” and (and right now you might be doubting the salvific power of the conjunction, at least when it’s used to escort such fancy-schmanzy terms to the pearly gates of a predicate), Alter still provides plenty of literary grace for us lapsed or ignorant laymen. At heart, he’s an old-fashioned close-reader of style: everything starts with language, and part of his skill is his ability to demonstrate how such simple words such as “and” help immortalize the Word of Logos. Granted, he tends to beat this trope to death, to the point of exasperating monotony at times, but he makes up for this sin with so many wonderful examples that I felt inspired to reread works like Moby Dick just for the sheer joy of the language (conversely, though, I was also reminded why I never want to reread Absalom, Absalom). His chapter on Bellow made me want to read much more of his work. A chapter on contemporary writers such as Marilynne Robinson (my original motivation for buying the book) and Cormac McCarthy is also quite good, though they get much less attention than the canonical Big Boys. You needn’t be a religious person or well versed in the Bible to enjoy this book. Alter, thankfully, is no religious evangelical; he is first and foremost a lover of graceful sentences and, despite the jargon, a precise explicator of the role of style in carrying form and message. If you’re the kind of person who likes to underline and record stylish sentences or who gets goosebumps reciting Babel’s ode to punctuation, “No iron spike can pierce the human heart like a period in the right place,” then you will find much to enjoy in this book. (and don’t be surprised if you find yourself noting how often that saintly little friar “and” saunters across the pages of your daily reading, from the sports page to the literary classic, whistling a medley of hymns and barroom doggerel)

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing serendipity that I picked this up immediately after reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy: Alter spends about 10 pages talking about it. And his understanding is very close to mine. He remarks that "...(McCarthy) is a writer whose mesmerizing power as a stylist often seems to exceed his range and insight as a novelist." I think I agree with that. And he notes poignantly that the last word of this almost hopeless novel is "mystery." But he spends most of his time talking about Moby Dick and Absolom, Absolom, making acute observations about how they depend upon, fight with, and enlarge upon references to the King James Version. That's been a commonplace about Moby Dick, but it's fascinating to see specific examples thoroughly examined by a scholar like Alter. He also has very good analyses of Lincoln's rhetoric, and of Gilead by Marilynne Robinson.

[withdrawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to admit to being a huge Robert Alter fan. While he does not pretend to be doing a complete analysis of the works and authors he surveys, his explication of these works through the lens of the effect of the King James Version of the bible is illuminating. I had previously noted in GR my impression that Hemingway's style was greatly influenced by the KJV, but Alter goes well beyond my understanding. He approaches each author from a different perspective, depending on how the KJV has influenced them. Having read this, I feel that I should go back to Melville, Hemingway, Faulkner et al to reread with this new light shining on the page.

[Douglas Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this study of the impact of the KJV on American writers, from Melville to Hemingway and beyond. Good stuff.

[Anand · Rating 5 out of 5]

When people focus on novels, they tend to focus on plot, character, theme, and history. While all of these are valuable and essential to understanding why great novels endure, style often gets lost in the shuffle. While I cannot claim to have a fantastic writing style for fiction (something I long for; I long to be on the heights of Melville, of Shakespeare, of Cormac McCarthy with his recondite lexicon and soaring biblical, Shakespearian, and Miltonic prose taken from the great Melville and Faulkner, and of Vladimir Nabokov, with his lovely eye for the visuals).

Robert Alter, American professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at University of California, Berkeley, sets out to correct the great neglect of style in his fantastic study Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible. The book is certainly about the King James Bible and its impact on the style of several American prose masters - Melville (Moby-Dick), Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises), Cormac McCarthy (The Road), Bellow (Seize the Day), and it succeeds marvelously as a study of the KJV's influence. But it is also a study of style in general, and as a study it is filled with marvelous insights about style that I think deserve attention.

"Style in America and the King James Version" gives a broad overview of how the KJV, with its language and the biblical themes, impacted American culture in general, and American prose in specific. He gives a fantastic example of Abraham Lincoln's speeches and how they show the gravity of the KJV that American writers tapped into. He then shifts toward his main focus: style in then novel. Does it matter much? It seems that it doesn't matter too much, as some major novelists have either average or bad styles (Dreiser, Trololope, Balzac, Stendhal), and others are fantastic stylists (Fielding, Flaubert, Melville, Henry James, Faulkner, Nabokov, Joyce). In his defense of stylistic analysis against the general thrust of literary studies, Alter succeeds ably. One of the things I admire most about Francine Prose's Reading Like A Writer is its attention to style, and Robert Alter successfully integrates stylistic and thematic analyses into his scholarly work for this novel, much like Prose did for her book that was aimed to the general reader (or writer). He also gives a brief and wonderful analysis of Moby-Dick that makes me want to delve into Melville's dark Shakespearean-Miltonic prose epic.

I find a choice section from the first chapter that I want to quote here at length:

In English, the great source of stylistic counterpoint is the two dictions deriving respectively from the Greco-Latin and the Anglo-Saxon components of the language: the former, polysyllabic, learned and sometimes even recondite, often tending to abstraction; the latter, phonetically compact, often monosyllabic, broadly associated with everyday speech, and usually concrete. The language of the King James version falls by and large on the Anglo-Saxon side of this divide, though there are abundant elements of the Anglo-Saxon stratum of the language that have nothing to do with the King James Version. The counterpointing of the two strata has been a feature of English prose since the seventeenth century, and we have already seen one striking instance of it in one of the excerpts quote from Melville. But it is Faulkner, clearly a kind of neo-Baroque stylist, who is the great master of this strategy of contrapuntal dictions. (34-35)

Such analysis leads on to a quotation and analysis of a passage of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, and the passage shows a strong sense of the counterpointing of Anglo-Saxon and Latinate diction that adds strength to the writing. '

Alter ends Chapter 1 with one of his best observations (it's the beginning of the last paragraph of Chapter 1):

Literary works are made of words, but they emerge from and address issues in the real world....What I would like to argue is that none of these considerations should entail an averted gaze from the artful, inventive, and often startlingly original use of language that is the primary stuff of literature, the very medium through which it takes in history, politics, society, and everything else. (40-41)

Amen to that!

The analysis of Moby-Dick and its polyphonic use of language instills in me a strong admiration of Melville's story and of his language. It makes me want to dive into his novel, and it gave me an appreciation for how Melville's style was both old-fashioned and innovative, in how it took from the history of literature and how it offered a fresh counterpoint to the old imitation of English prose that once dominated American literature (though I would say that Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville's friend and one of America's great romancers, was one of the best writers in the classical English style, and The Scarlet Letter, while not possessing the varied energy of Moby-Dick, is still a strange work of beauty, a work admired even by Melville himself).

Alter's study of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom is a strong case study of how even one of the most Latinate of writers, whose diction didn't quite take influence from the simple diction of the KJV, takes from the biblical lexicon of words and stories to create a large narrative of sin, struggle, and death. It's perhaps the longest section of the entire book, but I loved it. It is exhausting, insofar as Faulkner's writing is dense and exhausting, but it is worth the struggle to admire Alter's study and Faulkner's prose.

I really enjoyed Alter's writing about Saul Bellow's Seize the Day, which further strengthens my positive impressions of Bellow as one of the great postwar writers and one of the great literary stylists like Nabokov, Updike, Faulkner, and Joyce.

Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises also gets a solid analysis for its biblical prose of paratactic succession of events and details, a succession that matches the Bible's own description of events and details, a succession that gives the virtue of plain force that allows for an openness of interpretation and meaning. I feel compelled to bring up a quote from Alter regarding how Hemingway's attention to spareness contrasted to the old style of 19th-century novels, a quote that brought new insight to style.

What is at play in all this [in Thomas Hardy's style] is a fundamental assumption of the realist tradition of the novel that in England goes back to George Eliot, to Jane Austen, and, before them, to Fielding: space and time are intricately intertwined; you cannot focus on one space without an openness to the possibility of considering other spaces contiguous to it or indirectly impinging on it or associatively linked with it; and time is not an isolated point but part of a continuum that invites shuttling between before and after. To present this shifting system of interconnections, one needs a rich repertoire of syntactic subordination.

This quote really explains for me why 19th-century ornate prose was the way it was; it wasn't just describing and elaborating for the sake of elaborating (though it may seem that way); it was a way of seeing the world and all its manifold energies.

Alter's study of Gilead and The Road (both Pulitzer Prize winners) are fantastic and worth the read, though I would have a more positive assessment of Cormac McCarthy than Alter seems to have (according to him, McCarthy seems to be better as a stylist than as a storyteller; I see McCarthy as compelling not just for his wonderful style but because of the strangeness and energetic power of his best stories, which are simple yet complex).

All in all, Pen of Iron was one of the most satisfying literary studies I have read, not only for bringing to light the strong thread of the Bible and of the King James Version in the work of the strong American writers but also for bringing to our attention the role that style plays in the novel. Filled with insight, fantastic writing, well-placed and well-supported analysis, and a concise organization, Pen of Iron stands as one of the best works of literary criticism and history. Bravo to Alter.

[J. Alfred · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a thoughtful look at the impact of the King James Version on some of the masterpieces of American lit. It does thoughtful little analysis of Lincoln, Hemingway, Marilynne Robinson, and Cormac McCarthy (all spot on) and has longer chapters on Moby-Dick, Absalom Absalom!, and Seize the Day (all rated five stars in these reviews, he said, brushing the shoulders off).
You could use this-- I should use this-- as a primer on how to talk effectively about style. It is also a work of remarkable scholarship and enthusiasm which is enjoyably readable. If you need any convincing that the works in question, including the Hebrew Bible, is worth reading, this is a book you can consult. Highly recommended!

[Drew Norwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Alter traces the impact of the KJV in novels by Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, and (more briefly) Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, and Marilynne Robinson. His aim was to "try to see how the language of the KIng James Version is worked into the texture of the writing, making possible a kind of strong prose that would not have existed otherwise," and "to understand how this prose serves as the vehicle for certain distinctively American constructions of reality."

Style is an easily overlooked or forgotten characteristic of writing. It is with books like this one that help me to better appreciate the artistry of novelists. Like music and other arts, it doesn't take an expert to identify goodness or beauty, but it helps to know the underlying discipline in order to put your finger on the "why."

[Andrew (Drew) Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a riveting read. I imagine some might be worn down by the vast amount he discusses the prevalence of parataxis in the King James Bible and those who try to emulate it. But the analyses of the prose styles of writers like Melville, Faulkner, Bellow, Robinson, and McCarthy and their relationship to the syntax of the KJV was very welcome to this former English major and current teacher of biblical Hebrew.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was more narrowly academic than I expected (I now know more than I ever expected to about biblical syntax), but interesting enough. The best part was that it got me to read Faulkner.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Robert Alter is a proponent of an outmoded reading style that matches my own—by disposition, not training—which regards content and form as inseparable, and in which close reading thus includes the analysis of style, rather than the attempt to disregard it which has become fashionable of late in academia. Alter describes such readers as myself as “an embattled minority in a society where tone-deafness to style is increasingly prevalent,” in writers and readers alike. Pen of Iron centers around a stylistic tour de force whose style was taken for granted nearly from the start; the King James Version established precedents of prose usage and modes of expression that immediately, and permanently, redefined the contours of the English language, especially as used in literature. Alter looks not at influence, exactly—or at least not at conscious, influence, so pervasive was King James style for centuries—but at manifestations and adaptations of the stylistic choices of the King James Version, which appear in many forms, and perhaps all merely by absorption, reflecting the version’s power. The King James Version’s distortions of poetic meter from the original Hebrew, for example, led to styles blending poetic language with lengthier prose form, and each time this or other stylistic choices were borrowed—even for purposes rarely, if ever, found in the Bible, such as descriptions of people’s physical traits, landscapes, and introspection—a certain weight, dignity, and forcefulness was assumed along with it, by virtue of the recognizable mold of the prose; similarly, when allusions to the King James Version were designed, it was impossible for authors to execute them without bringing along elements of King James style along with them, highlighting the interdependence of content and form.

Naturally, there is significant stylistic variance—which does not preclude a cohesiveness of style—in the King James Version, and as a result, when those modes were refracted through the consciousnesses of the authors drawing upon it on as a resource and reference, making of it an unofficial, and unconscious, style guide, different aspects were integrated into different types of new styles. Alter centers one chapter each on Melville’s Moby-Dick, Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, and Bellow’s Against the Day, and in a pleasant surprise, also discusses Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Cormac McCarthy’s work in the final chapter, focusing not on a single work but on parataxis, the primary device that I had been aware of having been adopted from the King James Version for use in American literature. The biblical style calls more or less attention to itself in different cases: Melville uses it as one instrument among many in his orchestration, deploying the King James Version’s rhythm and verse structure more than its figurative language; Faulkner takes a more semantic approach, implementing the significances and senses of specific word choices (which also lends a sense of partial or indirect allusion); Bellow assumes the restraint, the spare simplicity, the stark, measured, noble diction, and the lack of direct causal suggestion and interpretation, instead rendering it implicit through sequencing; Hemingway affects the concision and the simplicity of chosen words (especially verbs), as well as the minimal usage of figurative language, opting for it only in the most basic senses, his narrators refusing to heighten the action or appeal directly to the reader, preferring to leave emotions unelaborated; and McCarthy enhances paratatctic rendering in high Modernist style, his fragmentation replacing paratactical commas with full stops.

Alter, in his first chapter—an overview of style in America as it relates to the King James Version—seemed a bit mechanical in his exegeses, including one of the Gettysburg address, but he settles down quickly, perhaps more at ease getting to operate at greater length, and mostly avoids unnaturalness or over-reaching (the main exception perhaps being the revisiting of a technique that struck me as highly effective on first use—a provided counterexample of the characteristic prevailing style, as contrasted with a sample of Hemingway’s work, to highlight the radical nature of his innovation—but fell flat and felt forcibly manufactured when he tried to reproduce the effect by merely constructing his own alternate, more typical, version of a sampled Marilynne Robinson passage). I decidedly knew I was in good hands once he invoked Mikhail Bakhtin and his theories of heteroglossia and dialogism, a figure and concepts with whom I only happened to be familiar because of an obsessive following of Elif Batuman’s interviews. There are scattered factual errors to be found (such as stating that Absalom, Absalom! was Faulkner’s only biblically inspired name, overlooking If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, or identifying the priestly benediction as being dictated in Leviticus, rather than in Numbers) but they don’t affect the substance of his cogent arguments. His erudition enhanced my appreciation of a number of works for which my admiration was already enormous, and the closeness of his reading and the incisiveness of his insight left me wishing that he could have addressed even more books, especially others by the same authors, and not only by way of selections, but in their entireties.

[Ed Courtney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting and informative book on the influence of the KJV Bible on American literature. It included authors Herman Melville, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway, among others. I was a bit disappointed that the part devoted to Cormac McCarthy was rather short and only included portions of his book, The Road. I feel like you could write a whole book about the influence of the KJV on McCarthy alone. Anyway, good book if you’re interested in this very niche subject!

[Joshua Booher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is very academic and requires a greater understanding of American literature than I possess. However, it was interesting and informative to read.

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book about literary style. What is style? Funny you asked: Alter defines style as “sound (rhythm, alliteration, assonance, and so forth), syntax, idiomatic usage and divergence from it, linguistic register (that is, the level of diction) and the cultural and literary associations of language.” (page 26) He goes on to say that the essence of style is that which can’t be translated.

This seems a narrow definition of style. What of figurative language, use of rhetorical devices, perspective, form etc. Does he not think that parallelism is a component of style? The Bible is suffused with it. The element has deeply influenced American writing.

That said, Alter makes two key points in the book. First, that prior to the mid-20th century, the King James Bible (and mostly the Old Testament) was a stylistic influence on the American prose, particularly of Melville, Faulkner and Singer (as well as Lincoln, Hemingway and others).

He starts with an exploration Melville’s use of the Biblical (primarily Old Testament) style in Moby Dick. I enjoyed this chapter (though I think it is difficult to parse the influence of Shakespeare from the influence of the Bible). The next three chapters, however, deal more with key words and themes from the Bible that are reflected in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom and Bellows’ Seize the Day. He also looks at Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

Is the use of key words from the Bible – idiomatic phrases that have almost become clichés like “flesh and blood” or “dust to dust” – really an example of style? Is this rare? I would think not, but I’m not sure.

His second, and secondary, point in the book is the lack of style in writing since the mid-20th century. He cites as the reason behind it the almost exclusive focus on ideology when examining a work of contemporary art. The examination of political power dynamics within the context of the book. In these discussion, style is, according to Alter, set aside and not discussed.

I can’t speak much for contemporary prose, not being an avid reader of novels. I’m more familiar with contemporary poetry and I can say that figurative language and the use of the rhetorical arsenal, so speak, is minimal to non-existent. Figurative language and rhetorical devices for the most part are perceived as inauthentic and contrived. To me, that seems to needlessly lock away some of the key tools of a writer.

This book ended up being a different than what I expect. And honestly, less than I expected. The book opens propitiously with a discussion of the style of King James Version of the Bible. But Alter’s definition of style is both so inclusive and so exclusive that my interest flagged. I am a huge admirer of Alter’s Bible translations, and his Art of Biblical Poetry is one of the most insightful books I’ve ever read on literature. This book, though, seemed to miss it’s mark.

[Alan Gerstle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this work of literary analysis clearly written and thoughtful; happily, it is jargon free. Besides showing the influence of the King James Bible on American Prose--From Lincoln to Cormac McCarthy--it also provides a good argument why the gradual displacement of the book among the reading public in favor of mediocre, impersonal prose, has in general lowered expectations of what a 'well-written' book is, suggesting that it opened the way for ideologically-based analysis, which has no interest in 'writing' and instead, an agenda-setting project to address purportedly more significant things like male dominance, gay studies, colonial studies, and so on. The chief problem with this shift in perspective is that it makes the idea of literature more irrelevant than it already is, and ultimately discourages a readership other than those people that want to replace the critics/teachers currently 'teaching' the stuff after they are all dead. And it also discourages people from becoming creative writers, or at least makes them end up being lousy ones. As John Updike says, fiction writers over the age of forty, read, in part (a large part) to get ideas for their own fiction

[Paula · Rating 3 out of 5]

I agree with one reviewer who says part of the author's intent is asking for a closer reading of literature. Alter is certainly a scholar of literature, including King James translation of the Bible. He is able to compare and contrast the language of authors such as Melville, Hemingway, Faulkner with the language and influence on the authors of King James version (KJV) of the Bible.

Though I found the book interesting, not being an English major or literature language analyst, I found that I had to look up the definition of multiple words. This is not a bad thing, but I am sure I got less from the text than other who study literature.

Alter's analysis of Moby Dick, The Sun Also Rises, and Absalom! Absalom! were the most meaningful to me, having read these novels.

Alter: "The KJV...once justifiably thought of as a national book of the American people, helped foster, at least for two centuries, a general responsiveness to the expressive, dignified use of language..."

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is often said that the three greatest influences on the development of English literature are the King James Bible, the Book of Common Prayer and the works of William Shakespeare. Almost all of the scholarly work pressing forward this assertion relies upon the demonstration of biblical themes in secular English literature and the adduction of phrases from the three sources in the later English fictional prose. Robert Alter is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Cal... (show more)

[Margaret Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author writes a fascinating observation about how certain American writers have reached eloquence by borrowing phrases, style, and ideas of human nature from the King James Bible—but more so in the 19th and early 20th centuries than lately. Some of the examples surely merit re-reading: Melville, Faulkner, Saul Bellow, always Abraham Lincoln, not to mention the Bible itself. Both the downside and the upside of this little volume of scholarship, however, is that I had to keep a dictionary ever at hand to look up words on almost every page!

[SallyStenger]

This book is a little bit different from what I thought it was. It is described as showing how the King James version has influenced literature. Alter focuses on three books: Moby Dick by Melville, Absalom! Absalom! by Faulkner, and a book by Saul Bellows. I haven't read any of those, though I did read Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. However, I find Alter's book very interesting just the same.

[Ron Coulter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Close readings of great American texts focusing on Lincoln's Second Inaugural, Moby Dick, Absalom! Absalom!, and a handful of twentieth century works. Alter demonstrates how the characteristic styles of Hebrew prose as rendered in the KJV find echoes in American (and, interestingly, not much British) literature.

[C · Rating 4 out of 5]

As an avid reader of the Bible and lover of the rhetorical analysis of literature, I thoroughly enjoyed Robert Alter's perspectives on the impact of the style of the King James Version of the Bible on American prose.

[Kathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very technical, in an English sense. I don't think anyone not an English major would enjoy it. I am an English major and I found it very dry, even though I am interested in the subject.

[Uco Library · Rating 4 out of 5]

Check out what our librarians are reading!

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

return to read this more in depth when I make the time to read some of the classics I missed on the first go round including the King James!

[Miriam Jacobs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alter is among the most insightful critics of this type, and this book, like his others is exemplary.

[Bryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A clever analysis...very clear and concise

[E · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alter is a literary genius when it comes to interpreting the Hebrew Bible; this work is just so-so. In it Alter looks at the American writers Melville, Hemingway, McCarthy, Bellow, and (Marilynne) Robinson. Some of these authors' work is suffused with Biblical imagery. Others use Biblical traits such as parataxis (a bunch of short sentences connected with "and") in their work. Others allude to distinctive Biblical vocabulary. Alter ably demonstrates these points, yet he struggles to make a larger argument: why is this distinctive? And if so, why is it important? And should this affect our appreciation of the KJV? I always enjoy reading sympathetic criticism of these great writers, but I'd describe Alter's book as a "take it or leave it" affair.