Over at The New York Times, Dwight Garner remembers the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch on the centennial of her birth. With many of her books no longer in print, Murdoch’s posthumous reputation leaves much to be desired, and her ardent fans seek to rectify this. “She was the rare kind of great, buoyant, confident writer who could drive the whole machine,” Garner writes. “She was as in touch with animal instincts as intellectual ones. The scope of her vision makes you feel, when you are close to her fiction, that you have glimpsed the sublime—that you have swum very near to a whale.”
Recovering Iris Murdoch
