Carter, a committed socialist, believed the novel had a moral function and that art was always political; this book ends on a note of class war and in a kind of dual triumph and defeat. But the real triumph of Hoffman is that it was, and still is, a new kind of novel – the novel as mutable form – a meld of genres which results in something beyond genre; a hypnotic mixture of poetry, dilettantism and morality; half-fiction, half-lecture and, above all, a thing of beauty in itself (for, as Desiderio says at one point, gazing at Albertina, ‘I did not mind her lecturing me because she was so
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