Volume 37, Number 17 · November 8, 1990
V.S.P.
By John Bayley
A Careless Widow and Other Stories
by V.S. Pritchett
Random House, 164 pp., $16.95
At Home and Abroad
by V.S. Pritchett
North Point Press, 332 pp., $19.95
Lasting Impressions
by V.S. Pritchett
Random House, 176 pp., $19.95
In the first sentence of his essay on Barbara Pym—still the best on that now fashionable novelist—the poet Philip Larkin pronounced that 'the first thing a novelist must provide is a separate world.' It is hard to disagree about that, although the separate world, like the realized 'character,' has come to seem increasingly beside the point to most contemporary novelists, who play about in their ludic structures, cheered on by academic critics. But the world of Dickens, the world of Hemingway? It could only be their own. Their own sort of characters, living in their own sort of world, are unmistakable: no doubt about it.
Review, 2457 words
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