EDMUND LEITES
125
equally dubious about the merits of modernity in marriage and the
family. Yet for the most part the revisionists' case is not persuasive.
Only Auerbach has an adequate sense of the degree to which private
life and personal fantasy require the nourishment of public culture.
Privacy cannot live on itself, and it is hard to see how a civilized
private life can go it alone. Gay's achievement, urbane if it is any–
thing, testifies to the merits of twentieth-century public culture. His
book on Victorian sexuality, with its easy and relaxed style, filled
with such an abundance of detail and with so little anxiety, could not
have been written without the benefits of modernity's attack on Vic–
torian repressiveness .
It
is an unwitting testimony to the freedoms
achieved by the twentieth century in its war against its nineteenth–
century past.
ODD NUMBER
ANovel
"Sorrentino's latest novel
places the reader smack in
the middle of a mystery that
expands and redoubles in
yeasty obfuscation . . . it
won 't disappoint his fans."
BOOKLIST
Cloth,
$16 .50
GILBERT SORRENTINO
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