"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed," wrote Pascal in the passage from which the title of Rebecca West's new novel ["The Thinking Reed"] is taken. The phrase is curiously suggestive of Miss West's own work. "Thinking," none could deny who watched the flashing wit in her essays of feminism many years ago; nor in the subsequent volumes of her literary essays, at all too widely spaced intervals. But a reed also is something through which music may be made, and even in Miss West's critical writing (sometimes, I have suspected, in spite of herself) there often has been a lyrical note with both depth and distinction. Her lyricism had a chance for fuller expression in the novels—in "The Return of the Soldier" in 1925 and "Harriet Hume" four years later. And in the four short novels published together in 1935 as "The Harsh Voice," there seemed to be a surer unity of wit and feeling than I had been aware of previously in her work.

Both strains reappear in this far more ambitious book…. [The] essence of the story is not in the mood of one outside, looking on. It has the directness of the novelist, not the detachment of the critic. Its substance is the conflict within a woman between her idea of herself and her pride in herself and her need and capacity to love….

[The two principal characters, Isabelle and Marc,] are real, especially Marc. Real, because one not only sees but feels their hopes and desires and shortcomings and frustrations. But behind them, like an elaborate backdrop in a play, stands a throng of their contemporaries.

What is extraordinary about these people is that they seem to exist not as human beings with whom Isabelle and Marc have some human contact, but as embodiments of impersonal forces—one might almost say of social conditions—with which those two struggle because they are among the rich and highly placed. Wealth and power, one gathers, are corrupting and depersonalizing both to those who rest on it and those who grasp for it. Marc would seem to have escaped because he has work and strength in himself and a heritage of work as well as money; Isabelle, perhaps because of the detachment of her orphanhood.

Now this view may be true. I suspect that to a considerable extent it is true. It would be more convincing, however, if one felt that in these cosmopolitans of Continental resorts there were something more than acid or flaccid sawdust. It is highly amusing to see the sawdust squirt when Miss West pricks neatly; a bit disconcerting, when occasionally she flays with fury. These furious lashings do not stir one, however, because these people are not real enough to matter. They exist on a plane wholly different from that of Marc and Isabelle.

The only explanation I can offer of that duality is that at points Miss West, the critic, has stepped into the place of Miss West, the novelist. To use other persons for one's own purposes is likely to be as dehumanizing in fiction as it is in real life. To make a generalization in terms of individuals is equally dangerous on the intellectual side.

These assertions do not mean to imply that Miss West's fictionalized social criticisms are to be deprecated. They are often brilliantly amusing and provocative. They show the reaction of a sentient mind to questions that are not at all amusing, though much of that reaction, as is the case in most of our contemporaries, seems to be frustration and confusion. For the purposes of this book, however, I wish the generalised criticism and the specific story had been divorced. We would have had the first more clearly and more cogently. And the other—which is the best fiction by Miss West with which I am acquainted: which to my mind means very good and very moving fiction indeed—would have had a better chance to have been read for its distinguished self.