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 min...

It may well be … that the period of bitterly opposed [literary] factions is already over, that novelists are starting to put sides to middle, borrowing elements of naturalism, modernism, symbolism and even criticism with cheerful insouciance. In his new book of essays [Possibilities], Malcolm Bradbury—himself both novelist and critic—suggests as much. True, he is not an impartial witness; he seems to hold much the same attitude towards the nouveau roman as Professor Weightman, calling i...

Hail the bumbling, fumbling conquering hero. Malcolm Bradbury has written a first novel [Eating People Is Wrong] that is sloppy, structurally flabby, occasionally inane, frequently magnificent and ultimately successful. It is as if Dickens and Evelyn Waugh sat down together and said, "Let's write a comic novel in the manner of Kingsley Amis about a man in search of his lost innocence who finds it." The result is one of the most substantial and dazzling literary feasts this year. Bradbur...

Malcolm Bradbury, the author of "Rates of Exchange," has always been concerned with defining the value of language. He once wrote that the novel "may resemble the real world in many respects and may appeal to a common recognition of society, reality, humanity; but it is a world made of language."… Although he has always used campus life and campus characters for his fictional world, he has never been what one might describe as an intellectual writer. His favored weapon has...

It is not every year that Malcolm Bradbury writes a novel. It is every decade that Malcolm Bradbury writes a novel. Already he has called 'Rates of Exchange' 'a novel for the early eighties,' just as '"Stepping Westward" was my novel for the early sixties.' Given such ambitions, it's no wonder that Bradbury's books are notoriously slow to get off the ground—and, in the present case, slower still to land. 'Rates of Exchange&#...

[The Social Context of Modern English Literature] treats literature as a social product: it occupies "a middle ground between literary study, sociology and intellectual history." It is broadly concerned with the "modernization" of the social world and the ideas of a distinctively "modern" literature. Professor Bradbury studies the intellectual response to large changes: the concentration of men in cities, the machine, shifts of administrative power. He also describe...

Malcolm Bradbury is a master of enumeration. "The History Man" … is packed with ludicrous or gloomy taxonomies. The female lead, Barbara Kirk, is … a promoter of Women for Peace, the Children's Crusade for Abortion, and No More Sex for Repression. The glass-and-concrete English academe in which her husband teaches burgeons with notices for all seasons. They include the Women's Lib Nude Encounter Group, the Gaysoc Elizabethan Evening: With Madrigals…. Each yea...

I am very interested in how this book ["Eating People Is Wrong"] goes down in the United States. For several reasons, I am sure the author is one of the most intelligent and gifted of up-and-coming English novelists. I am also sure that the difficulties of writers getting read across the Atlantic—in either direction—are becoming, not less, but greater…. I say all this because Mr. Bradbury's novel, which is extremely funny, packed with intelligence and moral feeling,...

[In Malcolm Bradbury's Rates of Exchange] Slaka is a volatile state in the Soviet orbit. Its 'history is a mystery' because at various times it has been conquered by every tribe in existence. This quirky Ruritania is in permanent flux: the grammatical structure of its language alters overnight (the populace obediently setting aside time in which to change placards), there are several financial systems, and the world beyond the capital is shrouded in mystery. It is a landscape in which g...

[Rates of Exchange] manages to be funny, gloomy, shrewd and silly all at once. Much of it, especially the first hundred pages or so, reads less like fiction than like a meticulously detailed journal kept by a jaundiced traveler with total recall. To anyone who has ever done time in that funny, gloomy place called Moscow the book will afford innumerable shocks of recognition. To everyone else it will provide comic but nevertheless reliable exposure to a land of astonishing inefficiency, awful food, rampant p...

To cover all of twentieth century fiction in 200 pages is no easy task; Professor Bradbury's survey ['The Modern American Novel'] does it smoothly and well. The necessary chronological structure is livened up by the trick of starting each decade with a key moment…. The literary 'isms' of these decades are clearly defined….

Although he claims, in the Introduction [to All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go], to having never been an Angry Young Man in the 1950s (they were all ten years older than he), Malcolm Bradbury's stance in this collection of witty sociological essays is precisely that of the provincial, anti-establishment, pooh-poohing intellect associated with Amis, Osborne, and Wain in their prime. First published in 1960 and 1962, his two books, Phogey! How to Have Class in a Classless Society and All Dressed Up and N...

The History Man is a novel about dehumanization; behind the book is a strong visual analogy, of a flat, hostile landscape, not our good old friend, of multi-storey car parks, block buildings, blank walls, treeless spaces, run-down city scapes, a graffiti-scarred new university which could, if events require it, be well converted into a factory, a world in which it is hard to put in the person. The characters, too, are hard objects, and there is no entry into their psychology or their consciousness: they man...

Malcolm Bradbury's first novel Eating People Is Wrong had a well-deserved success as a witty examination of the liberal conscience in a middle-aged professor at a provincial university. His new book [Stepping Westward], which attacks the same theme from a different angle, is just as entertaining, with some truly hilarious moments, and a lot of very sharp observation. This time the hero, James Walker, is a wilting provincial writer, thirtyish, going to fat ('bird-eyed, balding' according...

The hero, if so he could be called, of "The History Man" is a predatory, unprincipled and ruthlessly fashionable sociologist, Dr. Kirk…. The description of the evolution of this representative contemporary figure, and of his equally representative wife Barbara, is a small narrative masterpiece, occupying one short chapter but spanning the changes of the last 15 years…. Bradbury writes brilliantly about the way in which our concepts of ourselves determine every detail of our lives...

It must be … self-admiration that leads Malcolm Bradbury to fill a third of Who Do You Think You Are? with poor and loutish parodies of other writers, many of whom are a good deal better than himself. Mr Bradbury is of the opinion that random exaggeration and distortion, plus vulgarity, are a substitute for really understanding the forces which generate a writer's idiosyncracies; this opinion is false. Having finished with the parodies, a reader may turn back to the stories to see just what it...

A critical record, in a mere 186 pages, 'of the achievement of American fiction since the turning-point of the 1890s', Malcolm Bradbury's [The Modern American Novel] resembles, at first glance, a literary equivalent of those whirlwind tours that promise the delights of 12 capitals in seven days…. The book should be judged for what it is: a compact introduction for rookie undergraduates. Given the incidence of bibliophobia on our campuses, the book had to be, above all, brief and ...

["Eating People Is Wrong"] is full of jokes and witticisms of almost every description, but there are no funny situations, and the few comic episodes that occur are much too light, and perhaps also too tired, to stand up against the predominant, tragic predicament that is Treece's life. Treece's predicament is tragic, but his story is not a tragedy, because it is lacking in the act—the proof of life diminished or increased at whatever cost—that is required to comple...

What is best in [Rates of Exchange] is not the plot, which is essentially thin, nor the characters, who are essentially stereotypes derived from other Iron Curtain novels, but the exhilarating vigour of its author's intellect and style. I particularly enjoyed those passages in which, in the manner of Fielding—a novelist whom he resembles in his mixture of humanity, frankness and irony—Mr Bradbury buttonholes the reader as 'cher lecteur' and then delivers to him what is, in...