Customer Reviews

Never Ask the End

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Today Isabel Paterson is best known (to the extent that she is known at all) as one of the crucial figures in 20th-century libertarianism and an intellectual mentor of Ayn Rand. (See her fascinating political treatise The God of the Machine and Stephen Cox's excellent Paterson biography Woman and the Dynamo.) But in her own day Paterson, or "I.M.P.," was best known as a novelist and literary critic. Never Ask the End, first published in 1933, was, I believe, her most commercially successful novel.

Don't expect anything especially libertarian about it; while libertarian themes sometimes surface in her novels, Paterson wasn't a "political novelist," and despite the Rand connection her novels have more in common with, say, To the Lighthouse than with Atlas Shrugged. What's important is that Paterson was a good novelist, one whose work deserves to be rescued from obscurity. Never Ask the End, the gracious and haunting semi-autobiographical story of the entangled fates of three American expatriates in interwar Europe, is one of her best. I hope this republication helps to rekindle interest in this marvelous and unjustly neglected author.

A note about this edition; it's a facsimile reprint from Kessinger. Their publications vary greatly in quality (the Kessinger version of Lysander Spoooner's Vices Are Not Crimes, for example, is a disgrace), but their edition of this particular work is just fine.