The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 7

Recently, there has been a tendency to expand, using group portrayals (Brookner's Latecomers [1988], about two Holocaust survivors) or a global canvas (Drabble's The Gates of Ivory [1992], in which the English playwright Stephen Cox-also a character in The Radiant Way and, A Natural Curiosity-vanishes in Pol Pot's Cambodia). Yet this shift to a wider canvas has occurred without a sacrifice of the idiosyncratic voice. In Moon Tiger (1987), Lively's narrator Claudia Hampton is writing (as she dies in a hospital bed) a "history of the world, yes. And in the process, my own… I shall… flesh it out." Brookner, an expert in the emblematic portraits of Watteau, Greuze, and David, is another clear example of the portrait artist, interested in the novel primarily as a vehicle of character study, as is Pym. (Once asked what novel she would bring to a desert island, Pym chose not the expected Austen novel but Henry James's Golden Bowl.) -950- Byatt, whose early fiction has an academic tendency to telegraph its message, thematizes this concern by opening The Virgin in the Garden with a scene set in the National Portrait Gallery in 1968; the disillusioned poet Alexander Wedderburn "consider[s] those words, once powerful, now defunct, national and portrait ...»