The Hindsight Saga
NO LAUGHING MATTER by Angus Wilson. 496 pages. Viking. $6.95.
Somewhere along the line in this big novel, a half-read copy of The Forsyte Saga is tossed onto a "clover-infested" English lawn. With that gesture, Angus Wilson suggests that Galsworthy's interminable story of Soames Forsyte has perhaps been grown over by the grass of ages and that it is time to examine the social history and bourgeois values of Britain in the 20th century.
In a way, Author Wilson succeeds better than Galsworthy. He is wittier, and his reputation as...