Snow's very success in dealing with the moral and political experience of our time has diverted attention from his artistic achievement. Even his admirers have helped to crystallize the view of Snow as an intelligent and thoughtful commentator, and examinations of his fiction have tended to dwell upon his large attitudes and his sense of character. The recurring comparisons to Trollope reinforce the image of a plain novelist with unusual gifts of psychological penetration, discrimination, and tolerance, but with only mediocre gifts as an artist.

Except in the most general terms, not much has been said, for example, about the remarkable formal economy of Homecoming, or about the Proustian devices of repetition of place and of involuntary memory, or about the complex structure of the "Strangers and Brothers" sequence as a whole. A good deal has been said about Snow's bridging the gap between public and private, but...