"Critical Mass," a Collection of James Wolcott's Writings James Wolcott, the redoubtable Vanity Fair columnist, has written better than anyone about many things, among them the largely forgotten Beat-era literary critic Seymour Krim. There were so many things to like about Krim (1922-89). He was an excitable boy whose essays had clarity and muscle, finger-snapping phrasings, a heartbreaking honesty and an underdog tenacity. The titles of his books suggest their carbonated contents. One was "Shake It for the World, Smartass." Another, "Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer." In a fond encomium to Krim, republished in "Critical Mass," a career-spanning new anthology of Mr. Wolcott's writing, he reminds us what really made Krim's work sing. It was that he was "furiously funny, which is no small matter, and no small reward." Mr. Wolcott continues, purring, the critic as nocturnal D.J. rather than Oxford don: "Wisdom is for statues. Humor uncaps our inhibitions, unleashes our energies, seals friendships, patches hurts. Laughing is probably the most alive you can be. I held these sentences in my mind while paging though the epic, and epically rewarding, "Critical Mass." For while Mr. Wolcott has a reputation in some circles as a brawler and a takedown artist - Joyce Carol Oates and Richard Ford, to name just two of his targets, may still be picking buckshot out of their hides decades after his distillations of their work - this volume reminds you that he's primarily a reliable dispenser of heady delights. With John Leonard gone and Clive James dilating increasingly upon his own perceived end (get well, Mr. James), Mr. Wolcott is among the last of the great, garrulous, generalist critics, equally at home writing about TV, movies, literature, music, comedy clubs, you name it. I'm less taken with his political stuff, in which he can seem like just another sore head waiting his turn in the greenroom. "Critical Mass" scoops up the best of his material from Vanity Fair, for which he has written since 1983, as well as pieces from outlets that range from The Village Voice, where he got his start in the 1970s, to The New Yorker, Texas Monthly and The London Review of Books, among others. It's a vacuum-packed anthology of tight arguments and shrewd observations. The delight comes from pure recognition. Few writers can nail a performance, or an artist's body of work, with more ecstatic economy. Sammy Davis Jr., in his prime, was "a gleaming revolver of a man." The Sex Pistols resembled "a box of bloody Kleenexes." The director and comic actor Christopher Guest "looks like the winner of a staring contest." Mr. Wolcott doesn't just pin down Johnny Carson's essential reserve, his "broomstick posture and sentry eyes." He suggests that Carson's "irritable, opaque cool" seems to have been primarily inherited by Barack Obama, "equally lean, quick and unrattleable." Here is Mr. Wolcott happily meeting one of his favorite British novelists. Lunchtime in London. Ambling toward the lobby of the Savoy hotel is the author Kingsley Amis. He has a recognizable stride. It's the boulevard stroll Fred Mertz had in the episode of "I Love Lucy" where Fred, top hat atilt, chugged into a nightclub as an English duffer, doncha know." "Critical Mass" covers a lot of ground. "It's impressive how much you can get done," Mr. Wolcott says in his introduction, "when you don't go anywhere." There are appraisals of the directors Sam Peckinpah, Brian De Palma and Michael Mann, of performers including Patti Smith, the Ramones and Lou Reed (Mr. Wolcott evoked years loitering at CBGB in his excellent recent memoir, "Lucking Out"), and writers like Updike, Capote, Mailer, Vidal and Cheever. Along the way, he falls hard for Doris Day and Rock Hudson's sprightly comedies, lets the air out of the reputation of Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" and delivers the best assessment I've read about why TV now matters more than movies. Writing about the best-picture Oscar winner of 2012, he asks: "Does anyone think "The Artist" is better than "Mad Men"?" These essays make a sustained and surprising case for Mr. Wolcott as a soulful cultural sentry. He lingers on the aching sadness that undergirded "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," for example, and teases out the unlikely affinities between the Rat Pack and the Beats. This sentence about the poet Philip Larkin could apply to his own work: "What saves Larkin from sounding merely like the saltiest wit in the alehouse is his genius for observations that have an almost caressing regard." Mr. Wolcott, a dropout of Frostburg State University in Maryland, brings a finely honed class awareness to his prose. Dismissing Woody Allen's film "Hannah and Her Sisters" as a "schmaltzy piece of uplift," he declares, "Well, it's pretty damned easy to say yes to "life" if life is a beautiful, doting wife, fond, obedient children, and a roomy Upper West Side apartment in Manhattan stocked with cultivated friends (not to mention a silent black maid gliding in to light the dinner candles.) " That parenthetical about the maid really lets Mr. Wolcott stick, as they say in gymnastics, his landing. I have my problems with Mr. Wolcott's stuff. For one thing, his pantheon is largely a boy's club. He needles a lot of his favorites, nearly all of them rumbling white males, for their misogyny, reminding us, for example, that Mailer once nicknamed his penis the Retaliator. But the lack of women here is pretty painful. He can pack his coiled sentences too tightly; it's as if he perms each one's hairdo before pushing it out the door. "Having made his hoofprint in Hollywood as a horrormeister," commences a sentence about Mr. De Palma. He goes to the well too often for battle metaphors - every sally is a "bazooka blast" or a "switchblade flick" or a "catapult attack." It's as if Mr. Wolcott has been playing too many first-person shooter games on his Xbox. As a gamer, he can shoot first and ask questions later. Omitted from this collection is his infamous mauling of Pauline Kael's legion of followers, the so-called Paulettes, of whom he is (was?) one. "The Vanity Fair column that caused the rupture with my friend and mentor Pauline Kael is too awful an episode for me to fold into the collection unless I never intended to open the book; that I was never able to make peace with Pauline is a source of pitchforked remorse, if I could expunge the article I would," he writes. It was less than my finest hour, to put it ever so gently, and I want this collection to represent the writing I'm proudest of, happiest with, the pieces that carry a lift even if they're taking a contra position. All critics make mistakes; few acknowledge them so eloquently. I hope Mr. Wolcott isn't softening - the later major work collected here suggests he isn't, at least not much - but it's never too late to work on becoming a mensch.