Don't judge the book by its review

This practically functions as a product warning for me.  

At times painful and poignant, “Come Back in September,” Darryl Pinckney’s memoir of Elizabeth Hardwick and her New York intellectual world, is nonetheless a delight to read, full of deft character sketches and delicious gossip. https://t.co/tp4BFTAjih

— New York Times Books (@nytimesbooks) October 24, 2022

I am not keen on literary fiction, tending far more towards science, economics, history, poetry, and philosophical works.  I do read fiction, just not much and mostly either maritime history or crime procedurals.  And I like inspirational or uplifting stories.  

I don't know Elizabeth Hardwick's work and I am only assuming it to be literary fiction.  

With that as a background, a NYT review which promises pain, poignancy, unknown [to me] female New York intellectuals, and inside literary salon gossip tells me that this exactly the kind of book I would not want to read.  

Oddly, the Wikipedia entry for Elizabeth Hardwick makes her life and writing sound almost intriguing.  

I take a look at The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

In the last year or so the correspondence of quite a number of our writers has been published—Pound, Sinclair Lewis, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Edna Millay—and we have had memoirs on Willa Cather and others. The twenties, which only a few years ago felt so near, are gradually slipping back into that vault called American Literature, where the valuables are kept. The publication of letters is a compliment which suggests the writer is worth a kind of scrutiny not granted every author. As these writers begin to take on that faraway, mysterious, “historical” glaze, publications about them are of considerable importance; a certain ice of opinion, fact and fancy is already spreading over their images. And we cannot assume that eventually all letters, every scrap of interesting material will be published; what is more likely is that the selections, the biography, as we have them now will stand for a time.

Yes, there's promise in that writing.  Promise of craftsmanship with words and novelty of thinking.  

And from her biography Herman Melville.  

Whaling

HERMAN MELVILLE: sound the name and it's to be the romance of the sea, the vast, mysterious waters for which a thousand adjectives cannot suffice. Its mystical vibrations, the great oceans "holy" for the Persians, a deity for the Greeks; forbidden seas, passage to barbarous coasts-a scattering of Melville's words for the urge to know the sparkling waters and their roll-on beauty and, when angry, their powerful, treacherous indifference to the floundering boat and the hapless mariners.

The sea and the Whale, the Leviathan, monarch of the deep, preternatural immensity, exorbitant appetite, "a barrel of herrings in his belly"; hairless blubber, horizontal tail-the lure of the whale himself, his island bulk, "one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air." We take Melville at his word, for he is the historian, the biographer of the whale; the Sperm Whale with its precious oils and bones, the shy Fin Back, the Hyena Whale, the Right Whale, the Killer Whale. Cetology-a challenge to the mind and soul; the whale a fish for Melville, not a mammal, however warm-blooded the great one may be.

To think, I am introduced to Hardwick based on a review that sounded so repulsive, I had to check her out.

Hardwick seems interesting.  Is Darryl Pinckney's a good biography worth reading?  No idea, but it seems, despite the review, worth checking out.