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One of Stein's most revealing novels, A Novel of Thank You is her midcareer assessment of herself, her writing, and her relationships, composed in the unique style for which she is celebrated. In place of a traditional story, Stein explores the nature of narrative, its possibilities, the various genres (historical novels, the novel of manners, adventure stories) available to the writer, the conventions of novel writing, and the novelist's relation to her materials. In a sense, the novel is about "preparing a novel" (the subject of chapter 50), about everything that goes through a writer's head as she begins to write.
Mixed in with her meditations on writing are the daily events of her life with Alice B. Toklas, visits from friends - including such notable figures of the period as Josephine Baker, Virgil Thomson, Rene Crevel, and a number of expatriate American writers and artists - travels in and around France, memories of the past, inquiries into names and the nature of identity, and virtually anything else that occurs to her. She writes that, "It can easily be remembered that a novel is everything," and everything of interest to Stein goes into her preparations for the novel that is A Novel of Thank You.
