A
Literary Saloon
&
Site of Review.

Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs.


Contents:
Main
the Best
the Rest
Review Index
Links

weblog

crQ

RSS

to e-mail us:


support the site



In Association with Amazon.com


In association with Amazon.com - UK


In association with Amazon.ca - Canada


the Complete Review
the complete review - fiction



The Cabala

by
Thornton Wilder


general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

To purchase The Cabala


Title: The Cabala
Author: Thornton Wilder
Genre: Novel
Written: 1926
Length: 230 pages
Availability: in: The Cabala and The Woman of Andros - US
in: Novels 1926-1948 - US
The Cabala - UK
in: The Cabala and The Woman of Andros - Canada
La Cabale - France
Die Cabala - Deutschland
La Cabala - Italia
La cábala - España
from: Bookshop.org (US)
  • Both the Capuchin Classics and the HarperPerennial editions of The Cabala have a Foreword by Penelope Niven

- Return to top of the page -


Our Assessment:

B : minor, but amusing enough

See our review for fuller assessment.



Review Summaries
Source Rating Date Reviewer
Harper's . 12/2012 Michael Dirda
The NY Times Book Rev. . 9/5/1926 .
The Spectator . 29/10/2012 Steven Mcgregor
Sunday Times . 2/1/1927 .
The Times . 9/8/1969 .


  From the Reviews:
  • "His first novel, The Cabala, is packed with aphorisms, sardonic observations, and the kind of subtle wit we usually associate with the English comic fiction of the 1920s, in particular with such books as Ronald Firbank’s Vainglory, Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow, and Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, as well as that slightly earlier model and masterpiece, Norman Douglas’s South Wind. (...) The Cabala, in particular, deserves to be better known, in part for its deliciously worldly prose. The book, in which a young American observes the love lives and daydreams of a circle of decadent and religious cosmopolitans in Rome, displays a slightly brittle, polished French manner -- perhaps overpolished and even bookish at times. Yet the precisely engineered syntax of its sentences, combined with its striking similes and elegant diction, contrive to make it quite palatable" - Michael Dirda, Harper's

  • "Mr. Wilder, who is only 29 , comes before the world with a style distinguished by maturity and by an exquisite sense of tonal values, subdued to a perfect and supple instrument of literary expression. (...) The Cabala is an unusual novel. (...) Mr. Wilder is a mystic; he is a fine stylist: he clothes his mysticism in his style and lightens it with jewels of charming observation and felicitous expression; but his work contains no substance, as yet, which will appeal to the rank and file of the world. It is -- in the publisher's phrase -- esoteric, shyly allusive, a thing of the brain and not of the heart. In short, Mr. Wilder's style is more mature than its content. Nevertheless, The Cabala is a work of art, both in form and in design." - The New York Times Book Review

  • "Fabulism, or the placement of fantastical elements in everyday settings, is Wilder’s attempt at enlivening these fusty ballrooms. It is the perfect vehicle for his occasionally self-mocking, mildly troubled, exploration of questions of Christian dogma and belief. (...) The danger is that the novel can feel like a series of gimmicks instead of a sustained dream, a dive into the subconscious. The characters seem mechanical and bloodless at times." - Steven Mcgregor, The Spectator

  • "The Cabala, the work of a young author, has a good deal of body in it, and shows distinct promise. (...) It is good writing, with some deft touches." - Sunday Times

  • "Odd, fantastical, and fascinating." - The Times

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

- Return to top of the page -


The complete review's Review:

       The narrator of The Cabala is a young American who has come to Rome to study (as Wilder had, dedicating the novel: "To my friends at the American Academy in Rome, 1920-1921"), and begins with his arrival in the city. Americans abroad did well in this time shortly after the end of the First World War, and he soon settles in a five-room apartment in an old palace and has installed a cook.
       He arrives in the company of friend James Blair (who had completed: "six years of classical studies at Harvard" and now goes about: "filling immense notebooks with his observations and theories"), who makes him aware of -- and recommends he get to know -- the Cabala. The members are rich and influential, and: "Fierce intellectual snobs" -- and:

The chief thing about them is that they hate what's recent. They spend their time insulting new titles and new fortunes and new ideas. In lots of ways they're medieval. Just in their appearance for one thing. And in their ideas.
       The narrator does come in the orbit of the Cabala and, indeed, spends much time in their company, but as he notes, he chooses in these pages to be: "the biographer of the individuals and not the historian of the group". And so readers are treated to episodes focusing on and sketches of various members. There's the colorful backstory of Cardinal Vaini, for example, and his ascent to considerable power, not least by spending years away from Rome in deepest China, or a "fragile elderly" member of the French Academy who disowns his early work when the narrator praises it, and then even goes so far as to say:
     Why read me at all ? he cried in mock grief. There are too many books in the world already. Let us read no more, my son. Let us seek out some congenial friends. Let us sit about a table (well-spread, pardi !) and talk of our church and our king and perhaps of Virgil.
       After the opening chapter of 'First Encounters', the narrator devotes the next ones each to one or two individuals. First up is 'Marcantonio', the sixteen-year-old son of a Cabalist, the Duchess d'Aquilanera, a lad who has learned to enjoy the pleasures of women to a rather excessive degree, complicating the matter of marrying him off to the: "girl with an old name and some money" the Duchess has found for him; the Duchess tasks and implores the narrator: "you must save my boy". (He is not successful.)
       Next, there's 'Alix', who: "married the morose Prince d'Espoli who had immediately sunk into a profounder misanthropy", and who becomes hopelessly enamored of Blair, the obsessive scholar who can't handle her attentions.
       Wilder's writing is stylish and evocative, his summing-up observations elegantly pointed, and there are some fine examples here, as in his description of Alix even before she has fallen for Blair:
Like some panic-stricken white mouse in the trap of a psychologist's experiment she had been seeking her ends by the primitive rules of trial and error, only to learn that at the last one is too bruised by the mistakes to enjoy the successes. The exquisite and fragile mechanism of her temperament had not been able to stand the strain laid upon it, the double exhaustion of inspiration and woe; and the lovely being was already slightly mad. She grew daily more light-headed and could be caught from time to time in moods that were variously foolish and pathetic. But her deepest wound was still to come.
       So also he presents Blair well:
At times his scholarship resembled panic; he acted as though he feared that raising his eyes from the page he-would view the world, or his share in the world, dissolving in ruin. His endless pursuit of facts (which had no fruit in published work and brought no intrinsic esthetic pleasure) was not so much the will to do something as it was the will to escape something else. One man's release lies in dreams, another's in facts.
       The next chapter features 'Astrée-Luce and the Cardinal', with the narrator noting of religion-addled Astrée-Luce how this: "dear creature lived in a mist of real piety; her mind never drifted long from the contemplation of her creator; her every impulse was goodness itself: but she had no brains". She is very good, but living in upper-class and safely gilded comfort she struggles to live up to what she believes her religion expects -- indeed, demands -- from her. The narrator suggests:
I think she would have been very happy as a servant; she would have understood the role, have seen beauty in it, and if her position had been full of humiliation and trials it would have deeply nourished her. Sainthood is impossible without obstacles and she never could find any. She had heard over and over again of the sins of pride and doubt and anger, but never having felt even the faintest twinge she had passed through the earlier stages of the spiritual life in utter bewilderment. She felt sure that she was a wicked sinful woman, but did not know how to go about her own reform.
       Here, a conversation with the Cardinal leads to a crisis of faith which she is unequipped to deal with; the narrator tries to set things right, but his efforts falls short here as well.
       The final chapter tells of his leaving, and is titled 'The Dusk of the Gods', and it is this sense of decline and a coming to a close that permeates the whole novel. At one point the narrator observes: "All the voices of nature kept repeating: Europe is Dying", and the Cabala, trying to uphold old traditions -- indeed, resurrect long-buried ones -- is a group that clings to what is fading, sinking.
       The narrator -- called 'Samuele' by the group, rather than by his actual name, after a dog Alix once had who had: "spent all his life sitting around on the pavement watching us with a look of most intense excitement" -- is drawn into the group but of course can not be a true part of it; they understand he remains apart from them, and that is part of his appeal. Young, a foreigner -- and from the new world, America, that is beyond them --, and as a Protestant among Catholics (for whom the Church remains central and paramount), they believe he provides a different perspective. Tellingly, however, he repeatedly fails them when they enlist his help (suggesting also that their decay is beyond arresting, much less reversing, at least by outside forces; in part, The Cabala is a chronicle of the doomed).
       Among the narrator's ambitions while in Rome is to work on a play by Saint Augustine, but he doesn't seem to be able to follow through very well -- but it still serves as a fine calling card; as he nicely sums up:
None of my friends had ever seen the manuscript (even I was surprised to come upon it every now and then at the bottom of my trunk), but it was treated with enormous respect.
       That's typical of the charm of The Cabala, the narrator not taking himself too seriously. We don't learn that much about him otherwise, either; he reports on events -- and plays a role in many of them, but generally alongside the main actors, and without managing to be much of an influence on outcomes.
       The Cabala is a comic novel -- its tone and humor very much of much fiction of the 1920s. Style dominates over substance -- while there are some entertaining episodes, the point is more in the telling than the actual stories --, and while Wilder is still working on finding his footing here it is a quite fun read, and some of the turns of phrase and descriptions are excellent. It all doesn't amount to quite that much as a novel, but it's decent fun.

- M.A.Orthofer, 2 January 2026

- Return to top of the page -


Links:

The Cabala: Reviews: Thornton Wilder: Other books of interest under review:

- Return to top of the page -


About the Author:

       American author Thornton Wilder lived 1897 to 1975.

- Return to top of the page -

© 2026 the complete review

Main | the New | the Best | the Rest | Review Index | Links