Collected Essays Volume Two: "The American Novel" and "Reflections on the European Novel", and: Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola (review)
literary circle and not open enough to the very texts he is praising. After disposing of the deconstructionists, Boyers turns on Irving Howe, whose classic Politics and the Novel (1957) the younger critic finds hopelessly out-of-date: "No theory of the political novel that installs Orwell or Koestler as a representative figure is likely to know what to make of TAe Tin Drum or Autumn of the Patriarch." And for Boyers, Animal Farm and 1984 (published in 1945 and 1949 respectively) are no longer relevant to a discussion of the political novel since 1945, and the critic, in Minitrue style, drops them from history (maybe this is the "Atrocity and Amnesia" of his title?). In his second chapter, "Time, Presence, Ethics: Imagining a Shared Reality," Boyers sets up his amazingly complex critical apparatus. When, in the following chapters, the critic settles down to discuss the political novels of Naipaul, Greene, Solzhenitsyn, and Gordimer (a chapter each), he makes many excellent points, but the reader is struckÂ—dare he say itÂ—by how old-fashioned the analysis often is: Boyers discusses the plots, themes, characters, language, etc. of his novels in a manner very similar to his bÃate-noir, Irving Howe. Boyers is particularly good on Solzhenitsyn, and the critic's meat-and-potatoes approach perfectly matches the Russian's traditional fiction.