Cynicism is so poorly understood that it has unjustifiably become a synonym less of skepticism than of nihilism. Like pessimism, cynicism has become a metonymy of neurosis and error. In current usage, cynicism is necessarily wrong, and it is often applied to any critique. As a result, a cynic in contemporary usage is anybody who disagrees with you.

In his rehabilitation of cynicism, Benjamin Schreier reminds us that it is not amoral or immoral but quite the opposite. It is itself a school of moral philosophy. It informs two of our most important literary subgenres: parody and, especially, satire. At present, its primary instrumental value is that it militates against credulity. While cynics usually find most norms wanting, they do indeed endorse some norms and epistemologies. Despite their skepticism, cynics posit values just as certainly as do even the most skeptical deconstructionists.

In a critique of the new historicism, Schreier theorizes cynicism and then applies his findings to Henry Adams's The Education of Henry Adams (1918), Willa Cather's The Professor's House (1925), F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), and Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts (1933). Schreier devotes the introduction and first two chapters to a review of the pertinent scholarship on cynicism, a gloss on the current misunderstandings of cynicism, and the development of a theory and method of cynicism.

His chapter on Adams offers an even deeper theorizing of cynicism – in addition to a witty application of it. A particular strength is his argument against identitarianism, especially as it plays out in historicist readings of race.

The chapter on The Professor's House provides the most telling attack on one specious extreme of historicism: “The national fantasy of the self-evidently pure American origins … links the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the continent to modern citizens of the United States … but not to corrupted public institutions” (87).

Historicists will find that the chapter on The Great Gatsby is not as strong as the rest of the study. He tries to dislodge that novel's place as an example of national identity. Nonetheless, his witty attack on racialized readings utterly demolishes them by exposing them as factitious, tendentious, and pious.

By contrast, Schreier's analysis of Miss Lonelyhearts best exemplifies Schreier's examination of cynicism because it is the text that most problematizes representation and recognition. Indeed, both the swamp of mass culture representations and the proliferation of illegible signs and clichés enables the characters’ – and critics’ – blindness and disables their recognition.

Like many deconstructionists, however, Schreier might be too agnostic about legibility and reconcilability. Nonetheless, he negates what is ostensibly known, not the possibility of knowing. This trenchant study of the problems of and prospects for applying cynicism deserves to be mandatory reading on this often abused school of philosophy, and not just for literary critics but also for an array of fields in the humanities and beyond.