Joining the unfinished conversation between the satirist Jonathan Swift and the critic Edward Said, The Last Amateur argues for the transformative potential of literature.

What does “Swiftian” mean to you? For many, the name is synonymous with ingenious satire and an acid, clarifying mix of decorum and outrage. Jonathan Swift was, of course, the author of not only Gulliver’s Travels but also A Modest Proposal, which the columnist Gene Lyons recently called “perhaps the most penetrating anti-racist essay in the English language.” Small wonder, then, that the Anglo-Irish satirist was a lifelong inspiration to the great Palestinian American critic Edward Said, who for many years worked on an unfinished book about Swift and cultivated a Swiftian voice across his career.

Helen Deutsch’s highly personal book explores what Said’s love of Swift—and hers of both—tells us about not only these authors but also the powers of criticism itself. The Last Amateur is about how one comes to love one writer through another. Deutsch scrutinizes Said in relationship to Swift to raise questions of her own about the profession of literary studies. At a time when many in the field have lost faith in critique, Deutsch shows how passion and a refusal of professional propriety—the hallmarks of the amateur—can enliven critique again.  

What, then, does it mean to be a Swiftian? The Swiftian hears Swift’s animus and uses it as an incentive for their own freedom of thought. Said was a Swiftian because the experience of reading Swift freed him to speak out, to have something serious to say. Deutsch’s revelatory book is an exercise in hearing Swift’s voice and speaking in her own.

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“The Last Amateur is a hugely original and much-anticipated major work by a singular critic. The wager of the book, developed over a series of intricate readings and reflections that sit somewhere between memoir and critical argument, is that reading Swift through Said and Said through Swift transforms both—and, I think, us, as well. The Last Amateur makes good on this ambitious wager. The force of Deutsch’s claim comes from what it reveals about each of these writers and a set of important questions or commitments they share: about the practice of criticism and the role of the critic, the relationship between cultural traditions and a radically different future, and the relationship between the humanities and freedom.”

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“The Last Amateur is an exciting, original, and subtle book. There is a brilliant close reading of Swift and Said, and there are wonderful suggestions about what they mean when we put them together. How can Swift be the last amateur if Said (and many others) followed him? The same goes for Said, and we begin to realize how the word is working. We shan’t understand these writers if we don’t see how they situate themselves in relation to some kind of threatened ending, the fear that no one will follow them, that the very mode they write in will die. The book will be of considerable interest to anyone seeking challenging questions about books, reading, biography, and the hope for some sort of mitigation of dark days.”