The Middle of the Journey (New York Review Books Classics) - Softcover

Trilling, Lionel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590170156 ISBN 13: 9781590170151

Publisher: NYRB Classics, 2002

Synopsis

Published in 1947, as the cold war was heating up, Lionel Trilling’s only novel was a prophetic reckoning with the bitter ideological disputes that were to come to a head in the McCarthy era. The Middle of the Journey revolves around a political turncoat and the anger his action awakens among a group of intellectuals summering in Connecticut. The story, however, is less concerned with the rights and wrongs of left and right than with an absence of integrity at the very heart of the debate. Certainly the hero, John Laskell, staging a slow recovery from the death of his lover and a near-fatal illness of his own, comes to suspect that the conflicts and commitments involved are little more than a distraction from the real responsibilities, and terrors, of the common world.

A detailed, sometimes slyly humorous, picture of the manners and mores of the intelligentsia, as well as a work of surprising tenderness and ultimately tragic import, The Middle of the Journey is a novel of ideas whose quiet resonance has only grown with time. This is a deeply troubling examination of America by one of its greatest critics.

About this title

About the Author

Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) was an American literary critic, author, and University Professor at Columbia University. Among the most influential of his many works are two collections of essays, The Liberal Imagination and The Opposing Self; a critical study of E.M. Forster; and one novel, The Middle of the Journey.

Monroe Engel was for many years director of the creative writing program at Harvard University. His books include Fish and Statutes of Limitations.

Reviews

Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) himself took a more serious look at the political commitments of intellectuals in his The Middle of the Journey (1947), also newly reissued, with an intro. by Monroe Engel. Arthur and Nancy Croom, a successful, affluent, young couple loyal to the Communist Party, are spending the summer in Connecticut, where they help their friend John Laskell recuperate from a near-fatal illness. Their cozy view of the Party is challenged by a visit from Gifford Maxim, an impassioned ex-Communist from their circle. Maxim had been the most radical of them all, working with the Communist underground, but became disenchanted and left the Party at the risk of his life. In the meantime, the ailing Laskell, confronting his own death, feels alienated from all political preoccupations. Written a crucial 13 years after Slesinger's book (noted above), this moody document of a vanished intelligentsia anticipates the deepening crisis of the left in the McCarthy years.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: NYRB Classics
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1590170156
• ISBN 13: 9781590170151
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400