What Is a Conservative Novel?

Christopher J. Scalia’s 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (But Probably Haven’t Read) is a good primer, but I would not recommend it to anyone who can identify Hemingway and Henry James by their styles. At least a few aging conservatives will recall the difference between James’s lavish interweaving of clauses and the short, piecemeal sentences of Hemingway. What connects the two authors is their knowledge that artistic form can shape how we grasp reality. This artistic knowledge, which burst into new life among French painters and poets during the Belle Époque, goes back a surprisingly long ways in English literature, because the formalist instinct is always recognizing it. You can hear it in Hamlet and see it in George Herbert’s “Easter Wings.” Its relevance, in a technological age when nature often seems to imitate art, should not be underestimated. Such concern for form and style is not intrinsically political.