BECI CARVER. Modernism’s Whims.

Beci Carver’s Modernism’s Whims never quite pins down the keyword in its title. Whims reappear throughout under different guises: as ‘phosphorescent maybes’ (p. 7), chased by characters ready to be surprised; as poetic ‘pattern with latent irregularity’ (p. 128), a geometric capacity for otherness; perhaps most of all, in the critical ‘experiment in being surprised by joy’ (p. 171). But perhaps unsurprisingly for a book about whim, this playful open-endedness has its own compelling logic. With chapters on four authors whose alertness to whim both generates their modernism and is disavowed by it—Thomas Hardy, T.S. Eliot, William Empson, Elsie Elizabeth Phare—Modernism’s Whims is both ambitious and pleasingly off-the-beaten-track. It brings into view a shimmering, marginal, tricksy category, ‘whim’: one to which Carver’s affective, zigzagging close readings are brilliantly adapted to attend, and one which energizes her refreshing (and intentionally weird) intellectual verve. Whim so conceived may be un-pin-downable, but for that very reason it’s surely worth our interest. ‘Modernist whimsy’, as Carver writes, ‘is never predictable enough to imply a programme, though inconveniently […] this is also a necessary precondition for all interesting art’ (p. 7).