"The novel must be thought about, intellectually thought about, hard," Angus Wilson said several years ago while lecturing in California on writing fiction. It must also be recharged with drama and with life, he went on to add. Because Wilson has been so successful in achieving both of these aims, he has become without question one of the leading novelists of the post-World War II period and the only one of his generation so far to be knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to literature and the arts. Often confused with schools or trends, he has been mistakenly grouped with the "angry young men" of the 1950s, although he began publishing in the previous decade and is older than Osborne, Wain, Braine, and the other writers of that period. Later on, he was grouped with neorealists, like C. P. Snow, with whom he actually has very...