The idea is, I suppose, to present this novel as an immediate “classic,” with the underlying implication: “This has got to be a work of great literary genius (or else why have we sunk so much capital into it?).” Such faith in a really rather outlandish product is admirable and even touching but I think they are right to feel nervous. Hence, doubtless, the unusual volume of publicity material that accompanied the review copy of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, including a photograph of Miss Young delivering that mighty pile of typescript, and two pages of advance comments on the novel, all of them, in principle, favorable, ranging from the full-throated ecstatic to the mildly approbatory. If I were Charles Scribner’s Sons I think that I would be feeling pretty nervous about publishing a first novel that took seventeen years to write, came to 3449 pages of typescript, and, in book form, weighs three-and-a-quarter pounds.
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