“Milvain, with his keen eye and critical smile, unmistakably the modern young man who cultivates the art of success; his companion… a blending of the sentimental and the shrewd.”
Upon my words: easily I can come up with five men in each category in today’s publishing. Only I shan’t let out their names.
I think it’s fair for Milvain to say he foresaw the marriage trouble in the Reardon household—one reason I believe that he would make a better fiction writer than Reardon.
Maud and Dora “made good progress with the book they were manufacturing for Messrs. Jolly and Monk.”
What a great and apt word: manufacturing!
Join us on December 13 for a virtual discussion of New Grub Street with Yiyun Li.
"Sane literary work cannot be expected from [Reardon." I prefer slightly insane literary work, cf. David Foster Wallace, Plath, Lowell, Berryman, Woolf.
This fixation on invitations to lunches / homes reminds me of how there seems, at the time,, to not have been a Habermasian third space -- pubs, not yet??? or inaccessible to many of the characters, esp. female, in this novel -- where one might bump into an acquaintance. Other than the British Museum reading room.