A review by nohoperadio
The Soul of Kindness by Elizabeth Taylor

5.0

A perfect novel. I was extremely excited to learn this isn’t even her best-loved work and immediately purchased several more Taylors after I finished, but so far her better known books are nowhere close to this level. But still good!

Not easily summarizable. The cast is a large loose cluster of friends and acquaintances who each very much exist in their own individual universes of yearning and selfhood, but who together form a complicated network of mutual dependence and interference. Some of these characters are loveable, some of them are not, and I loved them all. The person the title is referring to–an important but by no means the “main” character, there is no main character–is the happiest among them, also the most modest and unassuming, the most generous, the one who thinks more than anything else about how to make her friends happy. She is also, and precisely through those things, the novel’s vision of evil. If this sounds dumb, I promise you, that’s my fault.