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The Miscellaneous Writings and Sterne’s Subscribers, An Identification List. The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, vol. 9 by Laurence Sterne (review)

Mr. Molesworth’s central chapters on Roxana and Journal of the Plague Year (chapter three) and on Tom Jones and Amelia (chapters four and five), build on this point, as they cast predictive thinking as the crucial dimension of the novel reader’s experience. Defoe’s fiction is animated, Mr. Molesworth suggests, by the tension between his thematic interest in risk-avoidance—which has him cast his characters as projectors—and the fact that narrative as such depends on statistically unsound, risk-seeking behavior. If in Journal of the Plague Year H. F. actually heeded the data set he had compiled and fled London and its risks, there would be nothing for us to read. Fielding more explicitly annexes the urge to gamble to the urge to enter a plot. The narrator of Tom Jones invites a readership wellschooled in Edmund Hoyle’s writings on whist to play along with him and, maneuvering his ‘‘characters like game pieces in and out of situations of high risk,’’ involves the reader in the ‘‘process of predicting precisely how these maneuvers will unfold.’’ In Amelia, however, Fielding appears as though he has begun to regard these very processes of inductive reasoning with something like Hume’s skepticism, and accordingly what begins as a plot of meticulously connected events lapses ‘‘into a plot of merely conjoined events.’’ If every reader of Tom Jones intuits that the deck is stacked in Tom’s favor, such confidence in teleology is strangely dissipated for the reader of Amelia. Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel is in the fullest sense of the word playful. The argument is both ludic and lucid—though one feels occasionally as though that lucidity has been purchased at too high a cost, and that too much nuance has been sacrificed for the sake of Mr. Molesworth’s polar oppositions and audaciously overstated claims. He never explains outright, for instance, why eighteenth-century fiction might not operate simultaneously as an instrument of rational disenchantment and as a locus in which modern magical thinking thrives: why either-or rather than both-and? It is, along similar lines, bothersome that Mr. Molesworth intimates that the novel was novel in enfranchising the individual’s claim to plot. He is, it seems to me, right to assert that this commitment complicates realism—‘‘since true realism would presume the absence of teleology’’—but wrong to overlook how before and after the eighteenth century Protestant spiritual autobiographies shared it. His study, however, takes the secularism of the culture as a given. He may take one risk too many in simply assuming that in the eighteenth century religious interpretations of why things happen yielded punctually to materialist interpretations. My own sense, though, is that this gamble and Mr. Molesworth’s others pay off. In multiple ways, Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel demonstrates that risk taking brings pleasure. Deidre Lynch University of Toronto