Michael Dirda on John Crowley's Aegypt

The American Scholar has a long essay by Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda on the just-concluded four-volume Aegypt series by the great fantasist John Crowley. Dirda calls the "1,700-page masterwork"

at once a work of realistic fiction but also a kind of romance, one where the outer world becomes a spiritual proving ground. Such forms of the fantastic or symbolic power much of the world’s art and literature -- think of myths, fairy tales, Arabian Nights-entertainments, Celtic romances, philosophical fables, travelers’ tales, much poetry, and all kinds of stories of what doesn’t exist but might or should or maybe could. More and more, many of our most admired contemporary novelists have been turning away from strict realism to offer instead counterfactual history, Borgesian fables of identity, even out-and-out science fiction. Like Michael Chabon or Cormac McCarthy, John Crowley is describing the labyrinth of this world -- love affairs, custody battles, parties, the usual joys and heartaches of ordinary people as they try to make up their lives and create their own histories. Everything is precisely what it is, yet also something more, something fateful and significant.

Dirda concludes:

With Little, Big, Crowley established himself as America’s greatest living writer of fantasy. Aegypt confirms that he is one of our finest living writers, period.