Stepping Westward is a great advance over Malcolm Bradbury's first novel, Eating People Is Wrong; in fact, it shows a really significant comic talent. (p. 53)
But I don't want primarily to appraise [Stepping Westward] here. I want to reflect on some of its themes, both as Bradbury handles them, and as they exist (in the reader's mind) outside his handling of them. Just what makes him a significant comic talent, of course, is that he puts his finger on material in the reader's mind that stimulates one to this sort of thinking. These themes may be described as some American psychological types and their environment, or the differences between all that and the English equivalent. But in fact, as Bradbury fictionally defines those types, they are something much more sharply challenging and richly suggestive than "types"; they are a discovery of his own, and a discovery for us of our own experience.
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