Word: novels
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...television soap opera could run for years on the bare facts of this novel's characters and plot. The major developments all affect Harry Cuno, a handsome, charming dilettante who lives in a Bloomsbury house and whose dead father was once a popular highbrow novelist. Harry has had two wives, both of whom died young. For the past two years he has conducted a secret, passionate affair with his second wife's younger sister Midge, who is married to a Scottish, half-Jewish psychiatrist named Thomas McCaskerville. Harry wants Midge to leave her husband, and her stalling makes him fretful...
Ultimately, all of the major characters in the novel get into trouble in this house. Stuart arrives, putting his charitable impulses to the test by trying to help Edward, and is driven out. Harry and Midge stumble into Seegard by mistake, which results in the exposure of their illicit affair. When he returns to the comparative serenity of London, Edward casts a baffled look backward at all he has experienced: "In a way it's all a muddle starting off with an accident: my breakdown, drugs, telepathy, my father's illness, cloistered neurotic women, people arriving unexpectedly, all sorts...
Edward accurately describes the novel in which he appears. The Good Apprentice is a tour de force of narrative energy. It also includes the provocative remarks ("If Newton hadn't believed in God he would have discovered relativity," or "Psychoanalysis attracts failed artists") that have become a hallmark of Murdoch's dialogue. But in raising expectations that all the frantic activity she describes will finally lead to some sort of understanding, the author finally sets herself up for a fall. A last word of sorts is left to Harry: "No one can avoid muddle." That is probably true. But Murdoch...
...part of their snobbery. A real English gentleman never tries; that was the article of faith." His complaints about silly and selfish women, notably Fiona's vacant sister and Volkmann's troublemaking wife, also deserve to be heard. But when all this grouchiness becomes the dominant element in the novel, the sensation of having been backed into a corner at a cocktail party is vivid...
...things; adults repress them. Only in an extreme case--like that of Neil, a sensitive scholar who has become a derelict, with speech rhythms and nervous tics that suggest the young Tony Perkins--does 28 Up offer a character as full and mysterious as we might find in a novel, or in an old friend. But it is not Apted's failing that he refuses to unearth tabloid headlines for his young-old friends. As it is, he has a big enough story: the end of childhood dreams, and the notion of maturity as surrender to somebody else's status...