[In the following review of Politics and the Novel, Duffy praises Howe's commentary on nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels but finds that his political commitment sometimes supercedes his literary judgement.]

The number of intelligent and perceptive books on the novel is so few that it is especially pleasant to welcome an addition to that small group. In Politics and the Novel Irving Howe makes a limited approach to fiction, but it is a worthwhile one because of the material he has chosen and because of his special talents and interests as a critic.

Howe is one of those critics whose concern is not solely with the literary work as formal object but also, and often more notably, with its cultural and ideological ramifications. In the field of literary history the late F. O. Matthiessen of Harvard gave brilliant evidence of the possibilities of such criticism in his American Renaissance. And Lionel Trilling of Columbia, the most distinguished of American critics, almost everywhere in his writing takes notice of what he himself calls the "hum and buzz" of cultural activity out of which art is conceived and to which, as well, it contributes.

Although Howe's literary intelligence is not so finely persuasive as Trilling's, and although he does not at all times maintain an appropriate detachment from his material, he is, nevertheless, not coarse in his method and he does not lose sight of his responsibilities as a critic. He is a representative type of the New York Jewish intellectual who has been in our time such an important and fruitful influence on American culture: a type that may be characterized as cosmopolitan, liberal, engagé, and most adept in the dialectic of art, philosophy, and politics. More personally, Howe has always been a radical socialist in politics so that the present volume emerges as a natural fusion of his political engagement and his literary interests.

In opening his discussion Howe defines the political novel as he understands it (italics are his): "a novel in which we take to be dominant political ideas or the political milieu, a novel which permits this assumption without thereby suffering any radical distortion and, it follows, with the possibility of some analytical profit." Somewhat later he adds that the political novel "is peculiarly a work of internal tensions. To be a novel at all, it must contain the usual representation of human behavior and feeling; yet it must also absorb into its stream of movement the hard and perhaps insoluble pellets of ideology."

After this basis of definition and problem has been established, Howe considers a variety of nineteenth and twentieth century European and American novelists from Stendhal to Orwell and including Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Hawthorne, James, Conrad, Malraux, and Silone. The particular novels examined range from The Possessed—Howe calls Dostoevsky "the greatest of all ideological novelists"—to 1984 which Howe, in perhaps his least literary vein, reads as a prophetic paradigm for the movement of our culture. In making the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century political novelists, Howe notes that the latter writers are much more closely involved with the politics they represent: "they are in their tragedies, their blood and hope are ground into the defeated revolutions over which they mourn." And it might in turn be noted about Howe that in describing the work of these writers, he also is much more involved in their politics; and the passion of his political commitment exceeds the intensity of his literary scrutiny.

Almost any of the chapters from Politics and the Novel might be cited for the enlightenment they give to the works considered: especially those on The Possessed, on James' The Princess Casamassima and The Bostonians, and on Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance. But the section on Conrad, "Conrad: Order and Anarchy," is of signal quality and may be used as evidence of the real contribution in Howe's method and of its weakness as well. Howe observes that Conrad was hostile to the life of politics and yet in some of his most significant work turned "to the world of London anarchists, Russian emigrés, Latin revolutionaries." This paradox in choice of materials is complemented by the polar influences of the two writers who "mattered most" to Conrad, Dostoevsky and James. Conrad claimed to have hated "the confusion and insanity" of Dostoevsky while he aspired to the austere formal achievement of James: yet beneath the austere calm of Conrad's own work the insane impulse always threatens to break through. From these premises Howe moves from a discussion of Under Western Eyes through The Secret Agent to Nostromo, which he regards quite properly as Conrad's masterpiece. But in his treatment of The Secret Agent, certainly one of the great pessimistic works of art in our language, Howe complains about the lack of "some dramatic principle of contradiction" in that "corrosive" novel, "a moral positive to serve literary ends." This criticism, even with its gesture toward "literary ends," seems to make moralistic demands on the artist to which the artist need not acquiesce. The greatness of The Secret Agent lies precisely in the force of its vision of a world without hope, without possibilities for individual moral achievement. To observe fretfully that the novel denies its characters "the mildest claims to dignity and redemption" is to reject the great bleak point of the novel—and to reject it on non-aesthetic grounds. Here Howe, the political humanist, seems to be on as infirm critical ground as the narrow religious critic who complains about the philosophical or theological bias of a work of art—when it is not his.

While it is inevitable that there should be omissions in such a study, it is surprising that no modern American political novel is given more than cursory notice: John Dos Passos, Lionel Trilling and Robert Penn Warren are covered in a perfunctory paragraph at the end of a chapter on nineteenth century American novelists. On the mechanical level another defect of Politics and the Novel is the lack of an index, useful and expected in any such serious work. Finally, the book is generally not well written and simply badly written in places. A careful revision of the style of Politics and the Novel might have removed some of the metaphors, intended to be illuminating but which only draw attention to themselves; particularly bothersome as mannerisms are the images of saturation with which the book is "drenched."

Despite this criticism, we are indebted to Irving Howe for the work of elucidation he has performed in Politics and the Novel. The effect of this book is the right one for such a study: it provokes the desire to turn back, with heightened interest, to most of the novels considered.