[The Rhetoric of Fiction] makes good the claim on the dust jacket that it offers "the most significant analysis of the novelist's art" since Percy Lubbock's Craft of Fiction. But it differs from that classic study, indeed from much of the criticism of fiction which it ably surveys, in that it is written with no overspecific commitment. Whereas since Lubbock there has been a tendency to be more Jamesian than James, the present study shows a catholic taste and a practical empiricism. It is refreshingly free from arrogance and special pleading, and it avoids the cryptic and the dogmatic. Yet it does not undertake a survey of the many mansions of fiction, or offer a formal classification by kinds, or proceed by taking up the great books one by one. It concentrates on rhetoric, the total of choices made by the author for the sake of controlling the reader's responses. The exact role of the author, and the degree and kind of involvement experienced by and planned for the reader are primary considerations throughout. (p. 295)

Recent criticism of the novel has sometimes suffered from excessive attachment to a particular author (James, Joyce, Faulkner), and at the same time tends to make sweeping statements about the form: the novelist should not "tell" but "show," should concentrate on "objective correlatives," will dissolve personality in "stream of consciousness," will free himself from the impurities of rhetoric, etc. Booth succeeds in showing the history, the advantages and special appeal, and the limitations of these particular views. He gives a fine account of the intimacy thus achieved, the participation of the reader in the author's project, but he points out that there is no one ideal general procedure concerning "distance" or concerning the degree to which the author should intervene directly or indirectly. Obvious as all this may sound when stated in a brief and general way, it leads to valuable results as the interrelationships of author, reader, and work of fiction are carefully explored. Rhetoric is not after all confined to any particular school of fiction—drive out rhetoric with a fork, she will still return. (pp. 295-96)

A brief account of the central ideas in this study is necessarily too abstract. Booth's discussion is not only illustrated by but based upon an analysis of a wide range of works of fiction; here Fielding, Sterne, Austen, James, Joyce, and Faulkner make particularly important contributions. But we are never diverted from the main line of the discussion. Though Booth's ideas of rhetoric come from and are confirmed by the practice of the novelists, he avoids the claim that he is telling anyone how to write a novel. He would be corrective of critics rather than of novelists. Once we are in the swing of the discussion we are caught up in the excitement of testing by classic cases. The analysis of Sterne, for example, leads us to accept Tristram as a dramatic narrator in the tradition of the author of Tom Jones; we accept him also as the heir of Montaigne's whimsical commentary and of the satiric and burlesque tradition of Rabelais and Swift. And we are led to ask: In what sense is the narrator unreliable? (p. 297)

A good critical terminology, such as we are given in this fruitful study, helps us to solve problems by encouraging us to ask the right questions. The basic assumption in the distinction between reliable and unreliable narrators is that there must be something to be reliable about—something more than pure objective circumstance or pure subjective essence; skepticism, nihilism, complete relativism are thus ruled out, and in the present state of the art and criticism such an assumption is worth explicit attention and full analytical presentation. If at times the expression "unreliable narrator" seems to emphasize the negative too much—seems to obscure the difference between the corrigible and incorrigible—in the long run it helps to establish us on a firm footing, rewards us with a fuller understanding of the achievements of the great novelists. Booth's work is required reading for all serious students of prose fiction, but it is the kind of required reading that yields delight and enlightenment. (pp. 297-98)