lOOKS
475
All this is careful and elaborate; nothing with this kind of accuracy
could fail to have value. But this book hasn't the skeleton to support
its weight, and Mr. Sillitoe seems to be temporarily at a pause.
The
General
showed he was no fabulist, and he can't go on reporting slum
Nottingham. The next book should be very interesting; perhaps, though
it is hard to see how this can happen, it will turn away from prole–
tarian class-writing (the whole mood of the moment seems to make
for class solidarity among writers) and consider some of the ways in
which the behavior of the English is independent of class-condition–
ing,
if
there are any. There is also, as I have hinted, the rich topic of
the
modern
myths
of class: crudely, the lies we tell ourselves about it,
as
if
there were no other way to speak. It is a question, with Sillitoe,
of talent continuing to work without the goad of resentment.
Frank Kermode
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