Publisher's Synopsis
A MORE than commonly interesting addition to the rapidly growing company of books around and about the novel is Mr. Follett's study of "The Modern Novel." One fault in these books as a class is a certain over-ingenuity, a restless desire to "score" for the novel or for the critic's special theory. That fault was not absent from Mr. and Mrs. Follett's recent volume of "appreciations and estimates." In "Some Modern Novelists" the coauthors showed themselves sensitive to aspects of story-telling, both human and technical, which neither academic nor popular criticism has made much of. But they also showed themselves rather in bondage to a preconceived theory of the modern novel. Their view of it as interpreter of the modern "sense of continuity -call it 'living in the whole, ' the social conscience, or simply the will to brotherhood" resulted in the assembling of strange bedfellows in their critical caravanserai. The sub-title of the present book, with its "purpose and meaning of fiction," has a slightly menacing air for the gun-shy. But Mr. Follett honestly intends to serve as disinterested guide and commentator upon a journey of importance to modern readers. What if he carries his own torch and compass, and even a weapon of private dogma bulging visibly somewhere about his person? It is plain that he means to use them solely for our benefit and protection. And he gives us fair enough warning that if we are only out for an airing in the region of the novel, we may not join his party. For a fiction without purpose or meaning would be a fiction without interest for this observer. He looks upon the novel as a form of art vitally related to modern life. This relation he defines with caution: "The universality of our interest in fiction does not prove that fiction has any inherent right to the space it occupies in our libraries or our lives; but it does prove that we have given fiction a sort of pragmatic claim on us by giving so much of ourselves to it. . The question is not, What must be our attitude towards the art of fiction'! It is rather, What must fiction have done to us before it becomes deserving of our consideration as an art?..."
-The Nation, Vol. 108
