Ideas and the Novel

In this eye-opening book, Mary McCarthy shares her love of the novel and her fear that it is becoming an endangered literary species

“He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.”

So begins Mary McCarthy’s fascinating critical analysis of the novel (and its practitioners) from her double-edged perspective as both reader and writer. The bestselling author of  The Group  takes T. S. Eliot’s quote about Henry James, written in 1918, as a jumping-off point to discuss how the novel has evolved—or not—in the last century. In this lively, erudite book, McCarthy throws down the gauntlet: Why did the nineteenth century produce novels of ideas while the twentieth century is so lacking in serious fiction? She winnows out the underachieving (read: overhyped) authors from the geniuses, explores why Jean Valjean personifies man’s conscience in Victor Hugo’s  Les Misérables , and shows how Stendhal’s The Red and the Black “illustrates the evil effects of reading.” She also tackles the role of the omniscient narrator ** and analogizes novels to air travel.

With its exploration of authors from Balzac to D. H. Lawrence,  Ideas and the Novel holds inviolate the idea of the novel as a means ultimately of liberating ideas.

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author’s estate.