Bennett, Wells, Conrad

Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 we all conclude feeling a vague frustration with Wells. Part of the problem is that Wells did not produce any transcendent "masterpiece" on which the importance of lesser work can depend; there is no The Ambassadors or Women in Love or The Golden Notebook. The Time Machine, Tono Bungay, or Mr. Polly, while undeniably high accomplishments , fail to orient the field. Wells's very ambitions and audacity , his daring use of many different forms to address a variety of significant topics, finally seem to have diluted his accomplishment in the judgment of posterity. As the Scheick and Cox Reference Guide shows, certain parts of Wells's work have become neatly ensconced in a nice little niche in the great altar of Art. The cement is beginning to harden. Books like Draper's can straighten the curtains a bit. Wells had his say about such pious attitudes in Boon. He would have tried to light a fire to it all. John Huntington University of Illinois at Chicago BENNETT, WELLS, CONRAD Linda R. Anderson. Bennett, Wells and Conrad: Narrative in Transition. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988. $29.95 LINDA R. ANDERSON SURVEYS Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad in their time and in their major works in the context of the important, even dramatic, changes in the novel from the midVictorian era to 1910, the year by which her three novelists had completed their major works. She supplies literary critiques of these works and also highlights their contributions to the critical debate about the novel and the role of the artist in the period. She explores the originality of these writers and also examines their ideas and the structure of their narratives as a response to the historical situation which they shared. In the main part of her book, Anderson traces Arnold Bennett's early works to the time of his writing serious fiction, beginning with Anna of the Five Towns (1902). His best novel, though, The Old Wives' Tale, was published in 1908. In this book Bennett both makes claims for the vastness of his design and also seeks to justify, almost as a subconscious or irrational desire, his return to his provincial subject matter. He wants to discover the universal conditions of existence, but he also wants to be able to inscribe them in particular lives, those of Constance and Sophia, at the same time that he places them within a densely realized social medium, which both contains 326 Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 them and extends beyond them. Bennett's novel differs radically from the common form of the nineteenth-century realist novel, where reality is both what the novel refers to and the object of knowledge which the narrative has as its end. Anderson shows clearly how Bennett makes the goal of his narrative a knowledge of what has been conceived not in terms of its inner significance but offered simply as existential truth. In this way Bennett may be said to make form and content coalesce. "The individual," Anderson concisely sums up, "though unable to transcend reality, is made to reconcile himself to the necessity of things, the past, what has already been defined" (94). Anderson finishes her consideration of Bennett and his works with a perceptive study of Clayhanger (1910), which is the closest of his novels to his "portrait of an artist" (95). Anderson's discussion of Wells and his three best novels, Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900), Tono-Bungay (1909), and The History of Mr. Polly (1910), shows that, like Bennett, what Wells stressed about the world of the nineties were the opportunities it offered to the industrious parvenu like himself. And, again, like Bennett, Wells rejected the idea of the artist as inevitably occupying a position of isolation and the seclusion of art as a category of knowledge and human endeavor. But he also shares with Bennett a central dilemma: how far he was seeking a new and different definition to the artist's role and the meaning of art, and how far he was simply denying its importance in favor of other preoccupations and interests. Wells was increasingly committed to a...