Dorothy J. Hale

Really, if your book is subtitled 'The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present,' it should be much longer than 225 pages. On the other hand, it felt *incredibly* long.

I'm guessing that this is a dissertation-turned-book, because it has an interesting and much-needed argument (that the Jamesian tradition is still really influential, not despite but because of the influence of Barthes, Booth and Bakhtin); it makes its points clearly but many times; and it hides those clearly made points in a mass of mind-numbingly dull, occasionally obfuscatory summary of the aforementioned theorists. Really, nobody needs eighty pages to summarize Bakhtin.

The book is also odd, because it's almost impossible to tell whether Hale values the tradition of 'Social Formalism' that she describes, or not. She describes its 'subjectivist' bases as a 'threat' to study of the novel; she also seems keen to defend her theorists from attack by others. Maybe it's just PhD burnout, whereby all of us get really irritated at the people we're working on, even though we fundamentally agree with them.

In any case, this would have made for three great articles. As a book, it suffers from the usual English-department 'Marxism,' which bears roughly the same relation to Marx that Hollywood romantic comedies bear to English Romanticism. And if she hadn't been so keen to point out the 'contradictions' in the thinking of people as smart as she is (most egregiously, the 'contradiction' between subjectivity and social constructivism, which was decontradicted by Hegel, then Feuerbach, then Marx, then Durkheim, then Weber, then the Frankfurt School and so on and so on), this would've read much more easily, I suspect.

On the upside, it's very well written *for a book of 90s literary criticism.* This is like saying "book x is very short for three volume Victorian novel," but still, it must have taken some effort on her part, and I'm thankful for it.… (meer)