What were Adam Verver’s views on the great Free Trade debate, on woman suffrage, on child labour? We do not know. It is almost as if James wanted to protect his cherished creations from our knowledge of the banalities they would utter if he once let us overhear them speak freely.—“Ideas and the Novel: Henry James and Some Others” One of the riskiest choices Mary McCarthy makes in The Group is the amount of time she devotes to letting us overhear some pretty dogeared banalities whenever her characters speak freely. This is especially true of probably the least sympathetic character Read more