Volume 11, Number 3 · August 22, 1968
Puppeteers
By John Wain
The Three Suitors
by Richard Jones
Little, Brown, 320 pp., $6.00
Cocksure
by Mordecai Richler
Simon and Schuster, 256 pp., $4.95
Enderby
by Anthony Burgess
Norton, 412 pp., $5.95
Love and Work
by Reynolds Price
Atheneum, 143 pp., $4.50
Probably not many literary people today would agree with my belief that self-consciousness more than any other fault spoils novels. The general feeling is that the novel is a form no longer entirely natural to our culture (any kind of audio-visual slop requiring the services of an army of technicians being more 'natural' in our time) and that the novelist, aware of working within a fenced-off literary enclave, must needs be self-conscious. The experimental writer has always been self-conscious in a harmless way (hoping the reader will attend not only to what he is doing but also to the way he is doing it), but once the experiment has been seen to work and the method absorbed, there is a healthy tendency to return to the broad highway of naturalness, telling a story because it is about people and events in which the reader might be expected to take an interest, something that impinges on his own life without the mediating presence of 'literature.' I admit that this attitude has produced some famous critical gaffes, starting with Samuel Johnson's 'Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.' But was it such a gaffe? Didn't the major achievements of the novel, in England at any rate, come out of the unforced naturalness of Fielding rather than from the narcissistic tradition represented by Sterne? Doesn't Tristram Shandy live as a wonderful oddity rather than as a seed-bearing tree?
Review, 2640 words
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