At times a book can attempt to do so much that its multiple approaches cancel one another, and we are left with very little: that may be what happens here. The opening chapter, “Lt Ian Watt, POW” has all the clarity of its subject, Ian Watt’s four years as a prisoner of war and slave laborer on the Burma Road. It is told in painstaking (and painful) detail and must certainly fill readers with awe and admiration for the strength of the survivors. We rarely, if ever, know very much about the personal lives of literary critics, and to realize, in this case, that Rise of the Novel was written within a decade after its author returned from hell is jaw-dropping.But perhaps there is a reason we tend to eschew biography when reading literary criticism. Without doubt, the books we favor, the approaches we practice, the themes we emphasize, can all be explored through our very different life experiences, but to suggest that an abiding interest in Clarissa and other rape narratives reflects one’s own traumatic sexual abuse—or that a rethinking of Rise of the Novel reflects adolescent rebellion against being the child of an expert on Aristotle—has always seemed, rightfully, beyond our remit. Similarly, although to a lesser extent, any attempt to explain an individual literary essay or monograph as determined by the zeitgeist seems an idle observation if only because it is so obvious. In that the study of literature has been a vital factor in creating the “processes of history,” in MacKay’s term, literary criticism explicates as much as it is explicated by those processes.The argument of this book, often diffuse, is succinctly summarized at the end of the introduction: “Watt’s key-words of individualism, empiricism, and realism became central to both the novel and novel criticism at mid-century because they were useful terms for trying to come to terms with the 1940s for those who suffered some of the worst experiences that even that abysmal decade could offer.” Additionally, realism became the means “for moral reckoning and social rehabilitation.” The first insight McKay offers by her invoking Watt’s POW experience is that his “understanding of ‘individualism’ is neither innocently descriptive nor... particularly celebratory,” indeed, that he believes it “entails a potentially chilling cultural transformation.” While it is undoubtedly true that individualism plays an important part in Rise of the Novel because it played an important part in western thinking after Descartes and Locke, it is also true that careful readers will recognize Defoe’s very mixed attitude toward people exploiting others, without needing the prison camp experience of “King Rat.” (MacKay’s suggestion that these were primarily American “gangster/capitalist” types elides England’s gangster exploitation of others long prior to 1940, otherwise known as imperialism.) Watt’s discussion clearly registers Defoe’s own dubiety with people exploiting one another, although perhaps not as clearly crediting its source in Christianity.Watt’s approach to Richardson takes MacKay through the film Bridge on the River Kwai and his consistent hostility toward it as a commercial fantasy, “pseudo-realism” opposed to “formal realism,” the term that embodies the core of Rise of the Novel. While Pamela could be diminished by applying “pseudo” to its plot and characters, or, from a more literary viewpoint, simply dismissed as a “romance,” that was not possible with Clarissa. Here it is suggested that Watt’s “war experience shows through most powerfully.” He was, in fact, both perceptive and eloquent: Clarissa was about “the unendurable disparity between expectation and reality that faces sensitive women in modern society, and the difficulties that lie before anyone who is unwilling either to be used, or to use others, as a means.” Once again, the problem for MacKay’s approach is that this reading is textually available to those who do not have Watt’s unique experience. What is particularly disturbing is her “surprise” at his “insistently feminist reading”: “Watt emphasizes the ruthless and predatory qualities of an entitled aristocratic masculinity.” Surely Richardson also emphasizes that point and thus enables those who read him to do the same. MacKay, in fact, wants to find Watt unique: “The 1950s is not an obvious source of such forthright feminist commentary,” but that sweeping generalization might itself be a good illustration of cultural “pseudo-realism.” No doubt university classrooms in the 1950s and ’60s were dominated by male professors, but we would have to embrace a theory that education takes place only in reaction to what is being taught if we are to dismiss the possibility that women in those decades were given both the impetus and materials that enabled them to frame feminism in the ’70s and ’80s. One might hope that women professors in this century do as well for their students as those maligned 1950s and ’60s instructors (many returning veterans) did for theirs.That Watt greatly admired Richardson’s novel disturbs MacKay because it seems to upset her thesis that he was suspicious about individualism. In commenting on Clarissa, for example, Watt had described her as “the heroic representative of all that is free and positive in the new individualism,” proof “that no individual and no institution can destroy the inner inviolability of the human personality.” There is some validity to MacKay’s objection because Watt is quite aware that this is no “naively positive and positivist” view of “individualist autonomy.” Again, however, this awareness comes from Richardson’s text and so is available to all readers; it is not, in brief, the result of Watt’s unique experience. That Clarissa’s freedom is vulnerable “to unforeseen depredations from within as well as without” was surely why Richardson encased his heroine within a Christian framework, and why it is necessary to keep her salvation in mind throughout one’s reading. Rise of the Novel shares the intellectual secularism of the age in which it was written, and certainly Watt’s war experience could have exacerbated that disbelief (although, as MacKay a bit scornfully notes, other POWs found religious belief a source of strength), but the failure of individualist autonomy in any account of human life with even a pretense of formal realism is as central a subject of early fiction as any other. Watt saw this with great clarity, although his solution, as MacKay points out in her best chapter, is Fielding’s faith in sociability, the idea of community as a replacement for more traditional ideas built around communion; in this, Watt is no different from almost every critic of the second half of the twentieth century.Watt’s dislike of the “individualist fantasies of mass culture” led to “a reluctant but genuine institutional-mindedness,” and, in turn, to Watt’s “realism of assessment,” which may not, pace McKeon, jeopardize “formal realism.” Rather, I would suggest, it is the inevitable result of reading eighteenth-century novels as if the “real” world being portrayed is limited to the bodily world; such a reality would be absolutely “unreal” to Richardson and Fielding—and, as important, to almost all their readers. Again MacKay dismisses religious faith, both the eighteenth-century variety and that of POW survivors like Terence de Pres, who came out of the war believing that “the will to sociality is a biological imperative, an instinct hardwired in the human animal.” She quotes approvingly Stephen Greenblatt’s snide dismissal of the idea (“How comforting”), finding implausible any “quasi-biological determinism.” It is difficult always to keep up with academic discourse, but MacKay needs to add to her reading list Michael Tomasello, Richard Wrangham, Pascal Boyer, Antonio Damasio, Alison Gopnik, and many other recent writers, scientific, religious, and humanistic, all of whom are cogently arguing for an innate human tendency toward community; or, to return to the eighteenth century, she might read Adam Smith.Never having joined the “alternative rise of the novel” campaign of the past fifty years, and, indeed, all that time having admired Ian Watt’s writings on novelists from Defoe to Conrad (I have not included in this review MacKay’s discussions of Conrad, Watt’s other major subject), I had hoped for a better book. But perhaps it is the entire thesis I find objectionable. That a critic’s encounter with a book is derived from previous experiences, however traumatic, rather than from the words being read, is to suggest that formal realism exists only in our own heads; in an age of alternative realities, that is a dangerous place to conduct any discussion of literature that centers on biography rather than metaphysics.