Malcolm Bradbury: The Novel Today

[Eric]

The "today" of "The Novel Today", edited by Malcolm Bradbury, was 1977 (when I had just left university). But I'd never read the book and found it for 10 Swedish kronor (about one euro) in a box outside a second-hand bookshop on Saturday.

I've just read the introduction, and it looks promising. There are about a dozen essays, written between 1961 and the mid-1970s by novelists, for the most, i.e. people who practise the art themselves. Names include Iris Murdoch, Philip Roth, John Fowles, Doris Lessing and John Barth. Plus the odd critic, such as Frank Kermode.

The last essay in the book is by Gerald Graff and is entitled "The Myth of the Posmodernist Breakthrough". I wonder what that looks like after almost 40 years.

The book looks very promising with one small fly in the ointment. That is that it is very much Anglo-American centred and only has one non-English-language author, and that is Michel Butor. Otherwise I'm sure it will make stimulating reading.

Have any of the rest of you read this book?

[Eric]

I'm a bit disappointed so far with this book, but will press on. The first essay, by Iris Murdoch, as called "Against Dryness", but is in fact a rather generalising philosophical overview that wanders all over the shop and is, alas, rather dry itself. Murdoch rather glibly throws in all sorts of names such as Kant and Sartre, without really explaining which bits of Kant and Sartre she is referring to.

Several of the articles in this book were originally published in "Encounter", and the journalistic dimension shines through. Even more in the second essay by Philip Roth where he spends the first two pages obsessing about the murder of two girls, which had evidently been a big news story in the 1970s.

I hope that the next essays or articles by Butor, Bellow, and Barth are better.