Volume 19, Number 6 · October 19, 1972
New Fall Fiction
By Michael Wood
House of All Nations
by Christina Stead
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 787 pp., $10.00
Chimera
by John Barth
Random House, 308 pp., $6.95
The Sunlight Dialogues
by John Gardner. originally scheduled for October; now to be published December 6
Knopf, 656 pp., $10.00
F. W. Dupee once wrote of a character in Henry James as falling out of the world and into the universe. Something of this kind has happened to narrative literature: it has fallen out of the novel and into fiction, out of detailed circumstance and into escalating hypotheses. We no longer have a purchase on the social world which is the ground of the novel, and we respond to this by creating vast, simplifying theories of conspiracy, which put us in touch with a rich universe of speculative myths but will not give us Julien Sorel or Anna Karenina or Balzac's young men.
Review, 3929 words
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