SOURCE: Kurzweil, Edith. “The Crack-Up.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (1 August 1999): 7.

In the following review, Kurzweil argues that The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume V: Pleasure Wars is a “superb and exhaustive tableau” of the development of modernism in the arts.

No one reading this last of Peter Gay's five volumes on the 19th century middle classes [The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume V: Pleasure Wars] (just now making its appearance in bookstores in paperback) will be inclined to bash the bourgeoisie any longer, at least not much. This superb and exhaustive tableau of the tortured highways and byways that gradually led to modernism—in painting, sculpture, music, architecture and literature—documents the ambiguities and ambivalences of Victorian culture all over Europe. Gay shows incontrovertibly that modernism could not have come into being without the bourgeoisie. He details the profusion of interlocking motives that enticed some...