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 Inspired and incredibly relevant August 22, 2008
Mr. Geoffrey W. Smith (Kent)
In `New Grub Street' George Gissing delves into the nature of the literary world of late Nineteenth Century London. His portrayal is stark and certainly in some ways pessimistic. Don't think, though, this subject matter too obscure. If anything, Gissing's observations are even more true today.
Gissing's skill at depicting the subtleties and contradictions of character, both male and female is unmatched, even in the modern age. `New Grub Street' moves you because you believe in the characters that he creates, and what's more, you can't help liking them. Even Jasper Milvain, who seems so hateful in the first chapter becomes rounded, full, even likeable at times.
The imagery that Gissing weaves into his text is gentle and apposite but never intrusive. The book is full of memorable scenes and conversations. You'll never read a more skilful piece of writing than the fire scene in any book, by any author.
This is the third of Gissing's novels that I have read (The Odd Women and The Emancipated were the others), and I have loved all three. For me, Gissing is the most under-read and under-rated of British novelists. 'New Grub Street', however, is the best of the three. It has all of Gissing's trademark qualities - intellectual dialogue, subtly developed characters with mixed motives - but is also masterfully structured with memorable scenes.
It's brilliant.
 Writing, money and alienation February 3, 2008
Graham R. Hill (Ilkley)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
New Grub Street is, of course, a novel about writing and writers. It is also, in common with pretty much every other 19th century novel, about money or, to be more precise, the lack thereof. It contains the usual extended whinge about how difficult it is to maintain the bourgeois lifestyle to which its protagonists consider themselves entitled by the accident of their birth and by their 'education'.
However, beneath those two themes there is a third which can even today speak to those who are neither 'men of letters' nor suffering under the delusion that society should be organised for the pleasure of the idle few. The novel deals, and deals well, with the plight of those who find no match between who they, in their own minds at least, are as an individual and the roles for which society is prepared to pay them. The alienation faced by Gissing's writers is certainly still felt by the far greater numbers of knowledge workers in today's economy.
A high point in nineteenth century literature August 5, 2006
Kenelm M. Averill (Sheffield, UK)
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
George Gissing produced this vision of a self-enclosed social order in as compelling a style as Eliot's Middlemarch. However, where Middlemarch focused on one town, Gissing takes as his object one economic sector - professional writing in the 1880s - and shows up its modus operandi, portrays its types, reveals to us the inner dynamics of profit and power driving the system, its various feuds along with the changing fortunes of the women and men who sought to earn a living by the pen. More than social history, its character studies live and breathe: Gissing imbibes his young married couples, patriarchs and struggling misits with a tragic power equal to their counterparts in George Eliot's work. Yes, there is excess dialogue, a flaw generally noted in Gissing, mostly in the final fifty or so pages. However this should be overlooked in finally judging the book because, to get down to brass tacks, we're dealing with a word used far too often but by no means out of place here: *masterpiece*.
Compelling, if not uplifting... July 25, 2006
Gordon Neill (Cranleigh, Surrey United Kingdom)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is an engaging, if ultimately rather pessimistic novel: the bleak irony which underpins New Grub Street is that those men who have sought to escape the mundane necessity of remunerative employment find themselves, through committing themselves to a career as a man of letters, in thrall to the harsh economic realities of professional writing in late Victorian England. These realities have never been described with a more harrowing authenticity than in New Grub Street - Gissing is writing from a series of personal experiences which left him tottering on the point of penury and starvation. His characterisation is memorable and his prose is lucid and engaging. Gissing will almost certainly never be considered amongst the elite of Victorian England's authors - he lacks Dickens' vitality, for instance, or Hardy's understanding of human potential - but New Grub Street is undoubtedly a significant and thought-provoking novel.
 Often intriguing, ultimately depressing April 12, 2000
6 out of 16 found this review helpful
Talk about a story and set of characters to darken your day. All the characters with integrity fail/die/disappear and all the ones who are not nice, succeed. As a budding novelist myself, I hope times have changed since those Gissing describes. What a well written, interesting, depressing book.
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