David Kurnick. Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. ISBN: 978-0-691-15316-2. Price: US$32.50

In the realm of literary analysis, the boundaries between genres can seem relatively fixed: there is scholarship on the novel and scholarship on the theater and only rarely do the two intersect. Yet in the field of literary production, such divisions often do not firmly hold. A remarkable number of the novel’s most celebrated practitioners attempted works for the stage at various points in their careers, a fact that has largely been relegated to the status of the biographical arcanum. The most penetrating insight of David Kurnick’s pathbreaking new study Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel is that the theatrical dalliances of a host of canonical novelists, ranging from George Eliot to James Baldwin, are not merely minor instances of experimentation but an important key to understanding their work in prose fiction and the nature of their novelistic achievements. As Kurnick argues, many of the techniques of the novel have a “genetic relation” to their authors’ theatrical endeavors such that “these techniques thus smuggle the memory (or more properly the fantasy) of the crowded theatrical space into the psychic interior” (11). There are any number of writers to whom Kurnick’s lens might be applied. From Charles Dickens to John Steinbeck, the list of novelists who also wrote for the stage—sometimes with a fair degree of commercial and critical success—is numerous. In many ways, Kurnick has staked out perhaps the hardest territory from which to advance his case: it is the novel of interiority that is Kurnick’s main point of focus, and the authors that he chooses to examine—William Makepeace Thackeray, Eliot, Henry James, and James Joyce, with an afterward on Baldwin—are those who are typically most credited with advancing the genre toward “the mapping of ever narrower interior geographies” (2). Kurnick argues that much of the formal character of the novel of interiority must be considered as a development that responds to and is shaped by the conditions of public theatrical performance that these authors experienced, both as spectators and, often, as playwrights. Consequently, he is concerned not so much with the nature of the interior psychology that is probed in the works that he examines as he is in the form that that mode of literary exploration comes to take: the tenor of an author’s narratorial voice or the kinds of spaces described and allowed within a novel. The formal features of the novel of interiority, Kurnick writes, frequently demonstrate “an impatience with the inward gaze of narrative fiction, in the process opening a self-critical perspective on these writers’ apparent project of making domestic and psychological interiors seem narratively important” (4). A detailed formal reader, Kurnick is also deeply attentive to the political stakes of the novels he explores. Empty Houses is a study in the history of the novel told with sidelong glances toward the theater, but it is also an astute political defense of a form that has received no shortage of ideological critique. Both in its penchant for focusing on the individual subject apart from her wider social matrix, and in its reinforcement of that alienation in the solitary act of reading, the novel of interiority is often regarded as politically suspect. As such, it seems to always stand apart from the stage. Even at its most reactionary, the theater cannot be subjected to this strain of criticism: the act of performance is always a calling together of a public, an act of temporary group identity that both explores and is always composed within the social experience. Kurnick does not imagine that the novel allows for anything like the same degree of collectivity as the …