Critical discussions of the novel of ideas have often asked us to take seriously the ideas articulated by fictional characters, and assumed that these ideas are sincerely held by those characters. This is in fact a good description of the serious novel of ideas, whose formal dynamics can be mapped onto theories of tragedy by Hegel, Lukács, and David Scott. But often, comedy and hypocrisy disrupt the presumed continuity between public utterances and private convictions or behaviours. This also often involves disrupting essentialist conceptions of identity and group belonging. Through readings of novels by Rose Macaulay, Doris Lessing, Jonathan Coe and Jeanette Winterson, this chapter argues that comic novels of ideas thrive on such discontinuities, diffusing and deflating identity categories as well as tragic collisions, and offering a distinctive orientation towards discursive liberalism as the primary medium of politics.

The novel of ideas is a nineteenth-century inheritance, and George Eliot’s work (where the story of this book begins) is of paramount importance. The ways in which Eliot’s work was discussed by key twentieth-century literary tastemakers – even by her greatest admirers and advocates – are indicative of an emerging consensus about the proper remit of literary fiction. Henry James wrote: ‘the author of Middlemarch is really philosophic. These great qualities imply corresponding perils. … Many of the discursive portions of Middlemarch are, as we may say, too clever by half.’ As he went on to write The Portrait of a Lady (1881), he borrowed much from Eliot’s depiction of Dorothea Brooke (from Middlemarch [1872]) and Gwendolen Harleth (from Daniel Deronda [1876]), but his ‘portrait’ deliberately omitted the ‘discursive portions’ that gave Middlemarch its philosophical, sociological, and political heft.

Some of the most celebrated writers of the 1930s generation dabbled with Marxist politics, but later renounced their earlier political commitments. A Cold War critical consensus emerged that saw Communism and its socialist realist theory of art as deadening forces, that were incompatible with good writing. Shifting the focus to some less canonical figures, the chapter sees the relationship between Communism and literature in the 1930s as a more productive one. The chapter focuses on three ‘conversion narratives’, whose protagonists move from false consciousness to political commitment: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show, Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, and Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair. These novels have complicated relationships to socialist realism. They want to cut through ideological fog and to see ‘reality as it is’ and ‘whither it is moving’ (in Radek’s phrase), but they use modernist literary techniques to this end, and grapple with epistemological doubt. They also complicate the traditional Marxist emphasis on class by putting it into dialogue with gender, sexuality, race, national identity, and rural identity.