Malcolm Bowie's book sets out to look at the interplay between theory and fiction in Freud, Proust, and Lacan. "'Theory' and 'fiction are, after all, alternative names for the verbal productions of those who indulge in an 'as if' thinking about the world," he reasons in the Introduction (pp.5-6).

The structure of the book is straightforward enough: Chapter 1 focuses on how Freud turns to fiction in order to think through his theory, a pattern that is reversed in Chapter 2, where Bowie examines how Proust's characters theorize and philosophize in the course of his fiction. Chapter 3 then brings together Freud and Proust to consider their shared interest in questions of language and sexuality.

The final two chapters on Lacan seem rather out of place here. Chapter 4 is largely an overview of Lacan's main theories, especially with regard to Lacan's formula that "the unconscious is structured like a language," while Chapter 5 examines how Lacan uses literature in talking about psychoanalysis. Bowie seems refreshingly suspicious of Lacan's use of literature - too often, he intimates, Lacan uses literature on the provision that it behaves as an obedient servant of the more important discourse of psychoanalysis. He also makes a fascinating contrast between the implicit way Hegel uses Karl Moor, the protagonist of Schiller's The Robbers, with the explicit way that Lacan replaces Moor with Alceste (from Molière's The Misanthrope) in order to make a similar point.

The epilogue is an extended meditation on how the varying dilemmas of Bowie's titular authors reflect the fate of Actaeon, the way the theory has a tendency to turn on the writer of fiction (Proust), or the fiction to turn on the writer of theory (Freud).

Bowie presents his ideas in an elegant and erudite package. Nonetheless, I never really felt as though this book, despite glimpses of brilliance, quite came together as a coherent and forceful argument.

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