Volume 16, Number 4 · March 11, 1971
End of the Line
By Michael Wood
Last Things
by C.P. Snow
Scribner's, 431 pp., $7.95
Flats
by Rudolph Wurlitzer
Dutton, 159 pp., $4.95
Dunfords Travels Everywheres
by William Melvin Kelley
Doubleday, 216 pp., $5.95
Blue Movie
by Terry Southern
World, 288 pp., $6.95
With his new novel, C. P. Snow has reached the end of Strangers and Brothers, a solemn, Edwardian sequence of eleven books, first conceived in 1935. Last Things. It is characteristic of Snow's lack of moral or literary tact that he can suggest an eschatological climax when he is merely finishing off a thick slice of middle-class English life. Earlier in the series, in The Affair (1960), he took the Dreyfus case as a model and backdrop for a squabble in a Cambridge college. He is aware of the distance between his small, prosy world and his grand allusions but insists, nevertheless, on comparisons, on suppressing differences. Cambridge, the Vatican, the Politburo: all instances, he says in the new book, of closed politics, 'much the same.' Generalizing of this kind has been his idea of what a major novelist ought to be doing. He has set out to be the George Eliot, or at least the Galsworthy, of his generation, to write nineteenth-century novels for a later day—a slightly alarming ambition but not in itself a silly one, since a case can be made for conventional forms so long as there are conventional realities left to be explored.
Review, 3306 words
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