From Booklist
Anything that keeps Boyle--prolific writer, humanitarian, and fascinating human being--before the public eye is worthwhile, but Spanier's discovery of the typescript of Boyle's long-lost first novel is truly significant. In an essay that could serve as an argument for retaining card catalogs, Spanier describes how she came across the "aging index card" in the New York Public Library that led to a forgotten manuscript that Boyle, living in France, had sent to a friend in 1924 and never saw again. Essentially a portrait of the artist as a young woman, Boyle's innovative if tenuous novel blends poetics and politics in a fictionalization of her Cincinnati childhood, during which her family went from riches to rags. The novel stars Kerith Day, an emerging radical close to her open-minded mother, critical of her conservative father and grandfather, and torn between two suitors, one "safe," the other emblematic of liberation. As Kerith considers her options, Boyle expresses her belief that individual choices impact society as a whole. Donna Seaman
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Booklist
Anything that keeps Boyle . . . before the public eye is worthwhile, but Spanier's discovery . . . is truly significant.

John Martin, Bloomsbury Review
Though completed nearly 80 years ago, [Process] could easily qualify as the most innovative and challenging work . . . this year.

Book Description
Process is the first novel written by Kay Boyle, one of the most enduring writers of modernist American literature. Written in 1924 and 1925, when Boyle was a young American living in France, Process was circulating among potential publishers when the manuscript disappeared. Three-quarters of a century later, Sandra Spanier, preeminent authority on Boyle, discovered a carbon copy of it while preparing an edition of Boyle's letters. Set off by Spanier's substantial introduction, it is published here for the first time. Process is a classic Bildungsroman and "a portrait of the artist as a young woman." Like James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, Kerith Day is a sensitive youth, self-consciously in search of her own identity and place in the world. Observing with a keen and critical eye the dreary industrial landscape and the beaten-down inhabitants of her native Cincinnati, Ohio, Kerith determines to discover something better. She sets off for France, where workers and radicals are on the same side, and places her faith in art and politics. This lyrical first novel captures the passionate indignation and urgency to independence that propelled the young Kay Boyle toward radical politics and literary experimentation. Part of the legendary circle of expatriate writers and artists in Paris in the 1920s, Boyle published some of her early poetry and fiction in the avant-garde little magazines, alongside the work of Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and Ernest Hemingway. After the appearance of Boyle's first published novel in 1931, Katherine Anne Porter signaled her as one of the "most portentous" talents of her generation. Like other cutting-edge work of its time, Process pushes the envelope of genre, blurring the boundary between fiction and poetry. Spanier calls this long-lost first novel the purest, most sustained example we have of Boyle's high modernist work. Its recovery marks a significant addition to the body of early twentieth-century American literature. As a political novel that predates the radical literature of the 1930s, as a novel of development written by an American woman, and as a startlingly innovative experiment, Process is a pivotal text for reassessing literary modernism.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Process is a classic Bildungsroman and "a portrait of the artist as a young woman." Like James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, Kerith Day is a sensitive youth, self-consciously in search of her own identity and place in the world. Observing with a keen and critical eye the dreary industrial landscape and the beaten-down inhabitants of her native Cincinnati, Ohio, Kerith determines to discover something better. Placing her faith in art and politics, she sets off for France, where workers and radicals are on the same side." "This novel captures the indignation and urge for independence that propelled the young Kay Boyle toward radical politics and literary experimentation. Aligned with the legendary circle of expatriate writers and artists in Paris in the 1920s, Boyle published some of her early poetry and fiction in the avant-garde little magazines, alongside the work of Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and Ernest Hemingway. After the appearance of Boyle's first published novel in 1931, Katherine Anne Porter signaled her as one of the "most portentous" talents of her generation."--BOOK JACKET.

FROM THE CRITICS

Kirkus Reviews