[Although] the novel is old enough to have a "tradition," which some would like to mortify by calling "great," writers like Angus Wilson are more likely to be drawn to the form precisely for its vulnerability to shapelessness and its susceptibility to vulgarity than to its respectability. Such a writer exposes himself in the act of writing to the same dangers and possibilities his readers struggle with every day. He is not a superior specimen, but a gifted equal.

During his long and varied career, Angus Wilson has continually experimented with narrative techniques and searched for definitions of his craft that do not exclude the messy world of private and public experience any more than they exclude the ordered world of books. His fiction is an unusual combination of two familiar English traits: earnestness and irony. Part of him is uncertain, groping, tolerant; part of him is knowing...