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New Realism and ‘the times at hand’

The chapter opens by considering the contested definitions of realism that often characterize discussions of the novel in the postwar British literary field. The Snow Circle—C. P. Snow, Pamela Hansford Johnson, and William Cooper—is then introduced. Hansford Johnson’s and Cooper’s attacks on the nouveau roman are shown to rehearse the Snovian critique of modernism, as well as to replicate its elisions regarding its own valuation of an opposing realism. Then novels by Rayner Heppenstall (The Connecting Door, and The Woodshed (both 1962)) and Muriel Spark (The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)) are contrasted. Both writers explicitly engage with the nouveau roman in their novels, and value it positively as a form of realism. However, Heppenstall is shown to remain within the frame of reference set down by European high modernism, while Spark sees the nouveau roman as exemplifying something new. The chapter concludes by showing how Spark’s understanding of the nouveau roman’s realism is echoed in the critical statements of a number of other writers, most revealingly B. S. Johnson.