'Here's something out of the quaint past, a man reading a book,' remarks E.L. Doctorow's narrator as he rides the New York subway. The other passengers in the subway are not readers but listeners, hooked to their earphones and tape-players, 'listening their way back from literacy'. And before literacy? 'The world worked in a different system of perception, voices were disembodied, tales were told.' If tale-telling is the sign of a primitive culture, we - this would seem to imply - have the novel; and the more self-consciously civilised among novelists have sometimes been anxious to disclaim the form's own origins. As E.M. Forster wearily put it, 'Yes - oh dear yes - the novel tells a story.' But storytelling will outlive the novel, and it is also elemental to the novel. It is not coincidental that each of the books under review ends with the lure of a further, untold story: a story which might or might not turn out to be the one we have just read.

LRB 4 April 1985 | PDF Download