PARTISAN REVIEW
critical task altogether. His discussion of Dostoevsky's buffoonery, of
Stendhal's operatic postures, and particularly of the language of
The
Bostonians,
exempt him from such strictures ; and these are only a
few of the many examples one could cite. But again and again we feel
this reluctance to penetrate to the innermost literary matrix of the
novels under discussion, until one wonders, finally, if this is not sympto–
matic of a reluctance to carry the criticism of ideology as far it will
go-which is to say, as far the novelists themselves take it. As critics
of ideology, the novelists (in the nineteenth century, anyway) probe
more deeply than Mr. Howe, as I am sure he would readily admit. Can
it be that his reluctance to follow all the way stems from a suspicion
that a total immersion in their criticism would dampen his ambitions
as a radical critic-that it might end in the very same cultural quietism
which he condemns in his liberal colleagues? One is left with the un–
easy impression that this may be so; that his energies as a radical critic
may require some ultimate reticence.
Yet, for all one's misgivings on this score, Mr. Howe's book speaks
to us with urgency and power.
It
brings alive once again, and makes
vivid, the possibility of a literature directly addressed to the crisis of
our time; it recalls literature to its most serious social tasks. In this
sense, it resembles in many ways the documents of the great Russian
publicists of the nineteenth century. It even partakes of some of their
rudeness and belligerency, which may be no small virtue in an age of
academic manners.
If
it does not succeed completely
in
its own ob–
jectives, it does nonetheless fasten our attention on the crucial prob–
lems, and it does this without the subterfuge and the doubletalk which
have often made our criticism a solemn comedy of the irrelevant.
Hilton Kramer
BROKEN EGGS BUT NO OMELETS
THE COMPLETE WORKS OF NATHANAEL WEST. Farrar, Straus,
&
Cudahy. $5.00.
Nathanael West has long enjoyed a peculiar underground
popularity-peculiar only because it has stayed underground so long.
Even the publication of his two nearly-conventional novels in paper–
backs has not materially improved his standing among the novelists of
the '30s. Everyone is still sure that the typical novelists of the decade
were Dos Passos, Farrell, and Steinbeck; West is an isolated figure
