Quick Take
- Narration: Joe Barrett reads Dave Hickey’s idiosyncratic, contrarian prose with genuine feel for its rhythms, a performance that respects the voice without homogenizing it.
- Themes: Art criticism as personal essay, popular culture’s neglected genius, the pleasure principle in aesthetic judgment
- Mood: Intellectually combative, casually brilliant, occasionally self-indulgent
- Verdict: Essential Hickey, uneven by design, but the best essays here are as good as anything in American art criticism.
Dave Hickey is one of those critics whose prose you encounter at a specific moment and it rearranges something in how you think about aesthetics. I came to him in my mid-twenties through Air Guitar, which remains his most celebrated collection, and spent several years afterward recommending it to anyone who would listen. Perfect Wave arrived later in his career and carries the weight of both the accumulated reputation and the accumulated grievances. It is not a perfect book, Hickey himself concedes this in the synopsis, which is either genuine self-awareness or a preemptive strike against reviewers. Probably both.
What it is, at its best, is bracingly alive, a collection of essays that proceeds from the conviction that pleasure and beauty are serious critical categories, not decorations applied after the real analysis is done.
Hickey’s Method and Its Discontents
The collection spans a wide range of subjects: Disneyland, Las Vegas, London, and Venice; Karen Carpenter and Waylon Jennings; Robert Mitchum and Jimmy Stewart; the films of Michelangelo Antonioni; Norman Rockwell; and Susan Sontag, whose later career Hickey dissects with what the synopsis accurately describes as wincing disappointment. What unifies these apparently disparate subjects is Hickey’s method, which is essentially to follow his genuine aesthetic responses wherever they lead, regardless of what the critical establishment considers worthy of attention.
This is simultaneously the collection’s greatest strength and the source of its most legitimate criticism. The Karen Carpenter essay, which one reviewer dismissed as total self-indulgence and a real who cares, is precisely the kind of piece that divides Hickey readers. It is a close, loving attention to a pop vocalist who critics have historically not taken seriously. Whether you find that illuminating or irritating tells you something about where you stand on the question of what criticism is for. Hickey’s answer, that it is for examining what actually moves people and why, is not without its own problems, but it is a more honest answer than most critics give.
The Bookending Personal Essays
Perfect Wave opens and closes with previously unpublished personal essays, including the title piece about Hickey’s near-death experience riding a wave into the rocks at Sunset Cliffs as a twelve-year-old. These personal frames are among the collection’s strongest pieces. The title essay in particular earns its metaphorical weight: Hickey as a boy launching himself at something beautiful and dangerous, as Hickey the critic continues to do decades later. It is a self-portrait that acknowledges the recklessness without apologizing for it.
The bookending structure also gives the collection a biographical coherence that a simple anthology would lack. This is Hickey at the end of a long career, looking back at his subjects with the particular clarity that comes from having argued about them for decades. That temporal dimension adds something to the reading experience that his earlier collections could not have.
Joe Barrett and the Challenge of Critical Prose
Joe Barrett is one of the more reliable narrators working in non-fiction, and his reading of Hickey’s essays is one of his better performances. The challenge with critical prose of this kind is that it requires the narrator to inhabit a very particular voice, combative, funny, sometimes seemingly casual, always precisely controlled, without flattening it into generic non-fiction narration. Barrett finds the rhythm of Hickey’s sentences and trusts them. He reads the Sontag essay with the right edge of regret, the Las Vegas piece with the right blend of affection and critique. At just under eight hours, the collection is well-paced as an audio experience.
Who Should Listen and Who Should Skip
Listen if you have any interest in serious art criticism written from a position of genuine aesthetic conviction rather than institutional caution. Listeners who enjoyed Air Guitar will find this a worthy addition to the Hickey canon, though perhaps not the equal of that earlier collection. Skip it if you are looking for systematic art history or criticism organized around movements and periods, Hickey does not operate that way, and the collection’s pleasures are inseparable from its apparent digressions.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Perfect Wave compare to Air Guitar for listeners who already know Hickey’s work?
Most readers and listeners consider Air Guitar his stronger collection. Perfect Wave is more uneven, it includes some of Hickey’s best late work alongside pieces that feel like extended tangents. The personal bookending essays are excellent, and the Sontag and Antonioni pieces are significant contributions. It is essential for Hickey devotees but perhaps not the first entry point for new readers.
Is the Karen Carpenter essay as self-indulgent as one reviewer suggested?
That depends on your tolerance for Hickey’s method. He approaches Carpenter with the same serious close attention he gives to canonical artists, arguing that her vocal technique and the cultural dismissal of her work tell us something important about how we evaluate art. If you accept that premise, the essay is illuminating. If you do not, it will feel like exactly what that reviewer described.
Does Hickey’s art criticism require specialized art historical knowledge to follow?
No. Hickey writes for an intelligent general reader rather than a specialist audience, and one of his recurring arguments is precisely that art should be accessible to anyone with genuine aesthetic curiosity. The essays assume cultural literacy rather than academic training.
Does Joe Barrett’s narration style work for this kind of personal essay collection?
Yes, Barrett is well-matched to the material. He reads critical prose with enough intelligence to honor the precision of Hickey’s sentences without over-performing the argumentative moments. For a collection where voice and rhythm are as important as argument, that is exactly the right approach.
