This joyous book takes readers on a literary adventure across 300 years of fiction, from Defoe to Zadie Smith<\/p>\n\n
In his opening paragraph, Philip Hensher declares that a novel not only \u201ctells a good story\u201d but is a good story in itself. We could extend that neat formula to include this book, which is not only a masterful account of fiction since 1719, when Daniel Defoe set Robinson Crusoe down on his desert island, but is itself a wonderful read. There is nothing dreary here; no sense of being back in the seminar room taking notes. Instead it is 600 pages of deep pleasure, an excuse to revisit old literary loves and be reminded of ones that have slipped from view.<\/p>\n
Hensher is smart enough to know why his book works so well and vain enough to tell us. The usual methodology for a survey is to assemble a roster of academics and invite them to trot out a chapter on their specialism, whether that be \u201cThomas Hardy\u201d or \u201cHigh Modernism\u201d. The result is a series of silos, with little sense of historical connection or intellectual unfolding. Hensher, by contrast, gives us a joined-up account of creative call and response. Equally crucial to this project\u2019s success is Hensher\u2019s own experience as a novelist. He brings a practitioner\u2019s informed eye to such questions as why some chapters in Dickens\u2019s Dombey and Son are in the present tense or how Henry James pulls off free indirect speech in What Maisie Knew.<\/p>\n
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