My old teacher, F. R. Leavis, would spend critical time only on novelists who reach the level of "significant fiction"; and the "insignificant" category turned out to include Trollope and even Thackeray. Recently I've rejected that criterion, and preferred a vertical slicing of writers into different kinds or qualities of significance, instead of his horizontal slicing between adequate and inadequate quantity. But Anthony Powell reawakens the old idea in me; his is such a clear case of insufficiency—of a lack of intensity of being….

[Infants of the Spring] is not a novel but an autobiography—but much more about other people than about himself—so like his novels. So the same reaction seems appropriate. He spends some pages instructing us in the differences between art and life, but I remain unconvinced that that matters, as far as my interest in Anthony Powell goes. He was an intelligent...