Wilson expresses the problem of the contemporary novelist in a striking question: "How can we combine caring with shaping?" The remarkable feature of his own career as a writer has been the way in which, despite the nihilistic tendencies of the age, Wilson has retained his care for humanity while enriching the formal elements of his work—though the formal complexity of the early works is often under-estimated…. Wilson agrees with the suggestion that his later novels reveal a less solid world than the earlier ones, relating this to his growing sense of the fragility of our civilisation. Some people, like Wilson's central characters, try to come to an understanding of the situation, but many avoid the issue and play "louder and louder games to disguise from themselves the earthquake surface on which we all live". Again we are made aware of the serious concern for humanity at the centre of Wilson's art. Despite his awareness of the elements of role-playing in social situations, which give the opportunities for his brilliant exercises in mimicry, and his modernist awareness of the subjective basis of all utterances, which leads to the use of pastiche, Wilson still affirms that "I do have a sense that there is something real" under the social surface, and his sympathies are always with those who try to develop that reality rather than retreat from it into a purely social identity…. [There is] a paradox which is central to his achievement. And it is finally linked with what Wilson rightly emphasises as a newer element in his work—which we may look forward to seeing further developed in future novels—the sense that "the London media world" is limitingly narrow and that truer values must be sought in awareness of "a wider world theatre", including nature as well as man. (pp. 216-17)

Fortunately it would be pointless here to try to sum up Wilson's achievement with any finality. What can be said now is that he is a restless and ambitious novelist who has never repeated himself, and who has used his great powers of observation and mimicry both to illuminate the change of English society and to suggest the epistemological problems posed by all literary texts. Criticism probably fails to do justice to the brilliance of his wit, but it can at least point to the range of relevance of his work. For Wilson has written about many of the main issues of our time: freedom and bondage in human relationships; the dilemmas of liberalism; the limits of language; the relation between public and private life; the appeals of role-playing; the temptations of magic; and, pervasively, the violence of the world. The seriousness of Wilson's concern about the general problems of the novelist is clear from his numerous theoretical discussions. But his attitude remains intelligently eclectic, refusing the doctrinaire solutions of either Social Realism or the nouveau roman, and expressing itself in a fiction which registers with uncomfortable accuracy the tensions and uncertainties of our world. (pp. 219-20)