Malcolm Bradbury is part of a new breed of British academic who is as seriously involved in novel writing as he is in literary criticism and theory. His university teaching seems to reinforce his writing (both fictional and critical) at every turn; he never strays far from campus life in his fiction--his three novels and many of his stories have academic settings--and his criticism appears securely linked to his role as classroom lecturer. As much at ease abroad as he is in his native England, he negotiates the literary and cultural terrain of America and France with the enviable assurance of the insider. This cosmopolitanism is as evident in his novels as in his nonfiction. Bradbury is a direct literary descendant of Tobias Smollett, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne in the eighteenth century; of Jane Austen in the nineteenth; of Evelyn Waugh and E. M. Forster in the...