Book Collective

Jonathan Dee’s reflections on the status of the social novel are a welcome critique of contemporary writing, but his argument is compromised by an elision in his survey of the form [“The Lives of Others,” Reviews, September]. He is right to trace the evolution of narratorial perspective from the “panoramic godlike omniscience” of the early novelists to the “radical subjectivity of modernism,” but this chronology by no means accounts for the entirety of literary production in the early twentieth century. In particular, Dee omits the many authors who, during the interwar years, pushed back against the strictures of…