In these elegant essays, many of them originally written for The New
Republic and Harper's, Robert Boyers examines the role of the
political imagination in shaping the works of such important
contemporary writers as W. G. Sebald and Philip Roth, Nadine Gordimer
and Mario Vargas Llosa, Natalia Ginzburg and Pat Barker, J. M. Coetzee
and John Updike, V. S. Naipaul and Anita Desai. Occasionally he finds
that politics actually figures very little in works that only pretend to
be interested in politics. Elsewhere he discovers that certain writers
are not equal to the political issues they take on or that their work is
fatally compromised by complacency or wishful thinking.
In the main, though, Boyers writes as a lover of great literature who
wishes to understand how the best writers do justice to their own
political obsessions without suggesting that everything is reducible to
politics. Resisting the notion that novels can be effectively translated
into ideas or positions, he resists as well the notion that art and
politics must be held apart, lest works of fiction somehow be
contaminated by their association with "real life" or public issues. The
essays offer a combination of close reading, argument, and assessment.
What, Boyers asks, is the relationship between form and substance in a
work whose formal properties are particularly striking? Is it reasonable
to think of a particular writer as "reactionary" merely because he
presents an unflattering portrait of revolutionary activists or because
he is less than optimistic about the future of newly independent
societies? What is the status of private life in works set in
politically tumultuous times? Can the novelist be "responsible" if he
consistently refuses to engage the conditions that affect even the
intimate lives of his characters?
Such questions inform these essays, which strive to be true to the
essential spirit of the works they discuss and to interrogate, as
sympathetically as possible, the imagination of writers who negotiate
the unstable relationships between society and the individual, art and
ideas.
