Novel Times

Abstract Now that The Road to the Temple was behind her, Susan was anxious to return to fiction. In preparation she began avidly to read new novels-and there were many from which to choose. In the three years since her return from Greece, Willa Cather had published The Professor’s House, My Mortal Enemy, and Death Comes to the Archbishop; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Ernest Hemingway, The Sun also Rises; and John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer. All, with the possible exception of Cather’s, were examples of a new sensibility at work, a modernist bent, addressed to a postwar audience that no longer looked for, or believed in, one universal order or overriding belief system or ideal to guide their lives. Susan held to the idealist notion that love might meliorate the alienation of the present period and provide a lost generation with a compass pointing home. Rather than plots with complications and clear resolutions, these novels presented fragments of daily life and personal relationships without any attempt to systematize or explain either. For Susan, such writing was interesting, even admirable, but not what she wanted to do. She had begun her career as a newspaper writer at the beginning of the century, and she still believed in the efficacy of stories and the truths derived from them. She might believe that “Life, too is combinations that baffle classification,” and she might desire to break forms and move her women characters out of confining circles, but as far as her fiction went, she was still wedded to traditional structures.