The Retreat of Western Liberalism, by Edward Luce (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press; 240 pp., $24.00).  Almost by the author’s admission, the title of this book is a falsehood.  Liberalism is not retreating.  It is being pushed back by “populists,” which is what liberals call people who are against liberalism because they are, for the most part, old-fashioned democrats in an age of illiberal democracy.  Edward Luce is an Englishman who works today as the American correspondent for the Financial Times.  As a former speechwriter for Larry Summers when he was the U.S. secretary of the treasury under President Clinton, Mr. Luce does not like populists at all.  Indeed, he finds them frightening, and believes they are likely to be even more so after President Trump has departed the scene and is succeeded by someone who thinks as he does but is far more competent in realizing his agenda.  “Populists,” he says, operate by identifying and persecuting scapegoats (immigrants, Muslims), and by disseminating false news.  “For populists, facts are either with them or against them.”  (The same cannot be said, apparently, of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN.)  Luce was encouraged to write this book by friends immediately following the election of Donald Trump who as President, he believes, is guilty of assaulting “America’s best liberal traditions.”  But what is happening in America today is only a part of what is happening in Western Europe and elsewhere around the world, as democracies perish or are gravely threatened by antidemocratic forces.  “Half of the European Union only adopted democracy in the late 1980s, and parts of it are already having second thoughts.”  Mr. Luce puts the rise of populism down to the fact that, as he sees it, “People have lost faith that their systems can deliver”—deliver, that is, jobs, more goods, and more services.  That being so, what he calls “thin globalization,” as opposed to the “thick” variety, offers “liberal democracy” its last chance.  Like other people who think as he does, Luce fails to recognize that “liberal democracy” is exactly what people are increasingly fed up with.  “Liberal” no longer means what it used to mean, because liberalism has transformed itself over the past three or four decades without liberals themselves seeming to have noticed the fact.  What formerly indicated a free economy operating within a democratic political system and keeping its hands off pretty much everything else now signals a commitment to a fantastical universe in which everything has its alternatives—not just political facts but scientific ones (including especially those pertaining to sexual identity and sexual, racial, and cultural differentiations), and finally basic human morality.  It isn’t just the economy, estúpido.

The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Misérables, by David Bellos (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; 336 pp., $27).  This is an interesting and well-executed account of the compositional, publishing, critical, and popular history of Victor Hugo’s famous novel that may—or may not—be “the novel of the century.”  (I prefer Sten-dhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir, while making no such claims for it.)  The phrase of itself is meaningless, of course, though it is suggestive.  Misérables is an enormous work of 1,915 pages (with notes, in my two-volume Gallimard edition) that was written over many years (though with a long interruption), sold for a then-unheard-of advance to the young publisher Albert Lacroix, and went on to enjoy commensurate sales.  Hugo, the son of a conservative military officer, was a conservative in his youth who became increasingly liberal until, when Louis-Napoléon made himself Napoléon III (“Napoléon le Petit,” to Hugo), he went into self-exile on the isle of Guernsey, where he finished writing the book and where he was living at the time of its publication in 1862.  Bellos has much to say that is interesting about the author’s drafting of the novel and about the development of his social views and his politics, his choice of names for his huge cast of characters, his alternations between a high and a low literary style, Paris in the period covered by the novel, the “mind” of Jean Valjean and the novel’s “meaning,” the subsequent multiple adaptations of the story in film and theater down to the present day, and a good deal else.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, Les Misérables has been for most novelists a supreme example of how not to write a novel—the diversions and digressions, the embedded essays on an encyclopedic range of subjects, the rudimentary dialogue, the surfeit of social fact, and so on, typical of the double-decker roman of its time.  Having read the book as a schoolboy (in a greatly redacted edition, though in French), and taken on the labor last spring of reading through the unabridged text in the original language, I find myself wishing I could like it more than I honestly do, though parts of the book are indeed wonderful.  For me, Misérables is an easy work to admire, but a hard one to love.  Nevertheless Volume II, set in revolutionary Paris, will perhaps be more gripping.  (I’m 100 pages short of beginning it.)  Meanwhile the vast scope of Hugo’s interests, and thus his vocabulary, is reflected by the number of times I have consulted my Larousse.  My irrelevant personal response to Hugo and his novel aside, Professor Bellos’s book is well worth taking up by anyone interested in his subject.