I've been rereading Iris Murdoch's 1973 novel The Black Prince, whose protagonist and narrator, Bradley Pearson, a writer and retired tax man in his late fifties, is enmeshed in Murdoch's typical and entertaining mishmash of farcical melodrama and Big Questions--in his case, questions about art and truth in his writing life. Bradley makes just about every stupid mistake possible in his personal affairs, a pattern that gradually leads the reader to mistrust any of his pronouncements about anything. Yet at the same time, many of his opinions sound perfectly reasonable and accurate, not to mention deceptively epigrammatic, as in:

It is sometimes curiously difficult to name the emotion from which one suffers.

One of the many respects, dear friend, in which life is unlike art is this: characters in art can have unassailable dignity, whereas characters in life have none. Yet of course life, in this respect as in others, pathetically and continually aspires to the condition of art.

I think women, perhaps unconsciously, convey to female children a deep sense of their own discontent.

Such statements practically beg to be copied down in a commonplace book, even though the character who speaks them seems to become more and more idiotic as the novel advances. This sort of trickery is one of the great charms of Murdoch's work, though I rarely feel that I've ever quite grasped their philosophical and intellectual underpinnings. Still, I don't know of any other novelist who consistently combines comic wife swapping with Socratic dialogues. For that alone, she is a pleasure.