Volume 39, Number 9 · May 14, 1992
Playing House
By John Banville
A Landing on the Sun
by Michael Frayn
Viking, 249 pp., $21.00
Daughters of Albion
by A. N. Wilson
Viking, 287 pp., $21.00
The novel is as English as roast beef or the monarchy, a national institution which in a declining age must be stoutly defended against skeptics and foreigners. By 'novel' here I mean the novel of manners, that essentially middle-class form perfected by the great Victorians. The present British prime minister, John Major, has claimed to have read all of Trollope (a prodigious feat, considering that author's vast output); the claim sounds more like an act of patriotic piety than of literary preference. (One of Mr. Major's more colorful and certainly wittier predecessors, Harold Macmillan, liked to observe that it was always a pleasure to go to bed with a good Trollope.)
Review, 3348 words
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