The Reader and the Novelist

Caroline Gordon’s How to Read a Novel (Viking, $3.50) is concerned with the general reader and what he demands of the novelist — and what the novelist in turn demands of him. Granted that a novel tells a story, the basic facts of fiction are not quite as simple as they are presumed to be outside the graduate schools (inside, of course, the reverse is true). Miss Gordon, herself a distinguished novelist, codifies these facts with lucid common sense—the problems of narration, plot, style, setting, and so on.

Her discussion of Henry James is particularly enlightening, for the general reader first exposed to the later James often tends to find himself enveloped in Laocoön coils. It was James’ achievement to have applied the technique of the theater to the art of fiction. As Miss Gordon puts it: “James has practically obliterated himself as a narrator. His stories are not told; they are acted out as on a stage.” Giving James all due honor, to her credit she is willing to stand up and be counted. As far as style goes, she considers James’ last phase of qualifying qualifications inferior to his earlier manner, and attributes those bristling, formidable sentences—probably correctly—to the influence of James père’s hair-splitting, logic-chopping embroideries.

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Francis Russell

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Caroline Gordon’s How to Read a Novel (Viking, $3.50) is concerned with the general reader and what he demands of the novelist — and what the novelist in turn demands of him. Granted that a novel tells a story, the basic facts of fiction are not quite as simple as they are presumed to be outside the graduate schools (inside, of course, the reverse is true). Miss Gordon, herself a distinguished novelist, codifies these facts with lucid common sense—the problems of narration, plot, style, setting, and so on.

Her discussion of Henry James is particularly enlightening, for the general reader first exposed to the later James often tends to find himself enveloped in Laocoön coils. It was James’ achievement to have applied the technique of the theater to the art of fiction. As Miss Gordon puts it: “James has practically obliterated himself as a narrator. His stories are not told; they are acted out as on a stage.” Giving James all due honor, to her credit she is willing to stand up and be counted. As far as style goes, she considers James’ last phase of qualifying qualifications inferior to his earlier manner, and attributes those bristling, formidable sentences—probably correctly—to the influence of James père’s hair-splitting, logic-chopping embroideries.