THE REACTION AGAINST EXPERIMENT IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL, 1950-1960

Professor Rabinovitz is a middling writer who has written a less than middling book. Surely the most interesting aspect of this work is its title. The method of presentation could be considered curious if it weren't so dull. After briefly certifying that there has indeed been a swing away from modernism in the English novel during the Fifties, three representative figures--Kingsley Amis, Angus Wilson, and C.P. Snow-- are discussed. We are then told what these writers feel about critics, reviewers, and other novelists; what other novelists, critics, and reviewers feel about them; followed by exactingly undistinguished summaries of the trio's novels and intentions, failures and triumphs. Giving the cushions of literary research a thorough spring cleaning is no doubt a commendable academic activity. That the undertaking should be merely informative, rather than original or thoughtful, is perhaps a technological hazard. Some of the quotations are surprisingly lively.