Peter Edgerly Firchow, Modern Utopian Fictions from H. G. Wells to Iris MurdochModern Utopian Fictions from H. G. Wells to Iris Murdoch. Peter EdgerlyFirchow. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007. Pp. xxv+199.

Abstract

The essay on Brave New World, which seems to me the most impressive chapter in the book, ranges significantly outside the assigned author and text, focusing as much on Francis Fukuyama's “The End of History?” (1989), with its later restatements, and on Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man (1964) as on Huxley's novel. Although Marcuse might seem an unlikely figure for Firchow to dignify, his sense of the seductive trap of America's success speaks to the deep pessimism about modern society, both its superficiality and its power, that underlies Firchow's book. Firchow accepts John Savage's position and values, and while most modern analyses might want to question these specific values or to historicize them in some way, the company of Fukuyama and Marcuse justifies a certain level of abstraction about the end of history. Here the savage indignation that Huxley's novel radiates and to which Firchow clearly responds finds its most satisfactory expression.