Four Contemporary Novelists: Angus Wilson, Brian Moore, John Fowles, V.S. Naipaul by Kerry McSweeney (review)

HUMANITIES 437 together Wilson's sense of discovery, his shifting preferences, changing tastes and views. At the centre of his interest lie the great works of the realist tradition - brilliantly expounded in essays on Clarissa, Jane Austen, and Dickens - but, always acutely aware of the present, he has vigorously championed the work of John Cowper Powys, Ivy ComptonBurnett , and Henry Green, writers still to be read and acclaimed as they deserve. The volume includes his original provocative repudiation of the influence of Virginia Woolf made in "950, and his eloquent repentance, 'The Always Changing Impact of Virginia Woolf' (1978), a tribute to her effect on his imagination and art. The closing section, 'The Novels of Angus Wilson: reprints a wide-ranging and penetrating interview with Frederick P.W. McDowell, not easily accessible in its original form in the Iowa Review. While nicely pulling together some of the diverse strands of such wide reading by so exuberantan imagination and so subtle a critical sensitivity, the editor's appropriately brief Introduction allows Wilson to speak for himself. McSweeney has chosen well and edited lightly, extracting the essential from literally hundreds of reviews and essays. The volume - not very attractively printed - is provided with a useful index. (J.H. STAPE) Kerry McSweeney. Four Contemporary Novelists: Angus Wilson, Brian Moore, John Fowles, V,S. Naipaul McGill-Queen's University Press. 217. $24.95 The essays collected here are sound introductions to four contemporary writers, informed by a thorough knowledge of their critical writings and sensitive to the uncertain status currently accorded realistic fiction. McSweeney's method is chronological, tracing progress from apprentice or first work to the mature, later work of each writer, showing how technical mastery and thematic concerns develop and gain depth, or, occasionally, as with Fowles's Daniel Martin, falter and retrogress. The four writers are grouped together because they are 'convinced of the continuing vitality of the novel as a unique medium for communicating human experience, and .,. are committed to its traditional constructive concerns' while at the same time conscious of and affected by 'what Bernard Bergonzi calls "the essentially problematic nature of fictional form in our time.'" The main thrust of these essays is evaluative: plot summaries are followed by a discussion of strengths and weaknesses in technique and aspects of a certain work are deemed either 'satisfying: 'successful,' or otherwise. Although McSweeney argues in his too brief Conclusion for the place of'rigorously sympathetic qualitative discriminations' in literary criticism, the search for these at times overwhelms or replaces the 438 LEITERS IN CANADA 1983 arguably more important critical function of explication and analysis. Thus parts of these essays betray their origins in the review-essay format and necessarily fall short of fully illuminating difficulties and subtly treating thematic concerns. The commentaries, however, are informed and convincingly argued, although one longs for a greater critical adventurousness - a willingness to diverge from a too confining aim and method. In a sense, there is too little to disagree with here, and the dialogue between critic and reader is excessively tame. Rarely do the evaluations differ from received opinion, an exception being the judgment of Wilson's Setting the World on Fire as different in kind from his other novels, whereas most reviewers (I think, rightly) saw it as an ineffective rehash of themes and character types that had already been completely explored. Some critical boldness is shown in the decision to examine Brian Moore's work in the context of better-known and more accomplished writers, but the discussion of his limited thematic range and problem in character drawing is apt to leave the reader sceptical about the claims made for him as 'an exceptionallyinteresting, affecting, and accomplished novelist: The essay on John Fowles - the book's longest - succeeds best in making the careful distinctions that readers will find useful in their own reading of Fowles's work. Here McSweeney has the scope in which careful, close readings support evaluation. (Indeed, some of the stories of The Ebony Tower are allotted more space than discussions of novels by Wilson and Moore.) Equally valuable is the introductory section on Naipaul, which traces the development of his imagination and sensibility through his critical...