The Unpossessed

“Unlike so many other thirties novels, The Unpossessed treats the “topical” themes of its age as subsets of a much larger, more abiding theme in literature: the folly of all human (and particularly of pompous intellectual) endeavor that aims at imposing a rational direction on something as incorrigibly messy as history. Slesinger’s note—perfect depiction of this folly gives The Unpossessed its irresistible narrative energy.” — The Atlantic Monthly

“It’s sophisticated…full of cutting observations and over—eager images; satiric, then ecstatic, alternating social criticism with displays of sexual and intellectual coquetry.” — The Village Voice

“The farce—or is it the tragedy?—of New York leftist intellectuals done in by free love is gleefully taken up in The Unpossessed…” — Publishers Weekly

“Miss Slesinger’s radicalism had somewhat the flavor of Dorothy Parker’s; it was disabused, worldly, and tended to view social man as a collection of hollow, wordy grotesques. Thus the class war is transformed in her novel very largely into a war of the sexes.” — Robert Adams, The New York Review of Books