The Lore of Living.

on which a laborer could earn ten pence a day with which to buy one meatless meal for a family of six people; the activities of the profiteers; the removal from Ireland, to pay the rent, of large quantities of food, and the terrible scenes caused by starvation and the diseases that followed in its train. Hardly less terrible were the sufferings of many of the emigrants. Her readers cannot escape three conclusions: no one could possibly have prevented immense suffering; much more could have been done by the richest government in Europe; more would have been done if the Famine had occurred in Scotland or Wales.

The novel glories in the ways of its creators, in the commonplace, daily problems of middle-class living. Unless it wears the disguise of a poetic form (epic or allegory, for example), the novel’s substance is the obvious; the measure of its excellence the extent to which it makes the obvious illuminating; its surest strength its success in calibrating and summing up the serpentine shifts of the ordinary, joining the accidental rhythms of life in an assignation with permanence. The three novels at hand admit no dishonor in dealing with the lore of the commonplace: sex, love and marriage. Each of these authors meets the demands of the genre: Saikaku, by combining vivid realism of surface with a fine poetic facility; Fuller, by tracing the intricate linkage of the circuits of memory with honest simplicity and sympathy; and Miss Calisher, most beautifully, by engaging delicate perception and rock-hard prose to record the secret arcs in which life repeats the obvious and subtly deceives.

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Robert Bemis

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on which a laborer could earn ten pence a day with which to buy one meatless meal for a family of six people; the activities of the profiteers; the removal from Ireland, to pay the rent, of large quantities of food, and the terrible scenes caused by starvation and the diseases that followed in its train. Hardly less terrible were the sufferings of many of the emigrants. Her readers cannot escape three conclusions: no one could possibly have prevented immense suffering; much more could have been done by the richest government in Europe; more would have been done if the Famine had occurred in Scotland or Wales.

The novel glories in the ways of its creators, in the commonplace, daily problems of middle-class living. Unless it wears the disguise of a poetic form (epic or allegory, for example), the novel’s substance is the obvious; the measure of its excellence the extent to which it makes the obvious illuminating; its surest strength its success in calibrating and summing up the serpentine shifts of the ordinary, joining the accidental rhythms of life in an assignation with permanence. The three novels at hand admit no dishonor in dealing with the lore of the commonplace: sex, love and marriage. Each of these authors meets the demands of the genre: Saikaku, by combining vivid realism of surface with a fine poetic facility; Fuller, by tracing the intricate linkage of the circuits of memory with honest simplicity and sympathy; and Miss Calisher, most beautifully, by engaging delicate perception and rock-hard prose to record the secret arcs in which life repeats the obvious and subtly deceives.