Volume 2, Number 11 · July 9, 1964
News from Nowhere
By Marvin Mudrick
Radcliffe
by David Storey
Coward-McCann, 376 pp., $4.95
Lindmann
by Frederic Raphael
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 335 pp., $4.95
The Sun's Attendant
by Charles Haldeman
Simon and Schuster, 320 pp., $4.95
Each of these three novels is a very—David Storey would say 'hugely'—ambitious and assiduous effort to prove something. The contemporary novel seems to have inherited, or at any rate arrogated to itself, the vatic function of such characteristic Romantic effusions as Blake's or Shelley's or Wordsworth's long poems. God the tyrant having been (at least tacitly) deposed, by what principles or impulses ought one to live? Mailer, Styron, Baldwin, Bellow, Updike, Salinger—each is a ferocious didactic partisan of that intersection of prejudgments, impressions, sensations, inferences which makes his heart sink or dance to nobody else's music. The aim is religious: to convert idiosyncrasy into newly minted doctrine, public gold.
Review, 2097 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |