Of The Wrong Set, Sean O'Faolain wrote admiringly that Wilson ‘is already completely déniaisé’ (D. 148). Déniaisé is a strikingly apt word, with its roots in the loss of sexual virginity, meaning ‘educated in the ways of the world’, ‘without naïvety’, ‘smart’ ‘worldly-wise’. It is no accident that the ‘street-wise’ Martin Amis recalls his admiration for early Angus Wilson (D. 589). Both are sometimes ‘knowing’ writers. Wilson, moreover, in his literary criticism, can be knowing in the most admirable sense, as well as generous, insightful and omnivorous.

Wilson was deeply aware of this, and uncomfortable with it too. He spoke both of the novelist 's joy in the predictability of human behaviour and also of the higher joy of creating characters who genuinely surprise their author, adding that only Tolstoy and more rarely Stendhal achieve the latter (F. 189). Meg Eliot 's renewal culminates in her hope ‘never to be surprised by modern life again’, in other words, not to be knocked off her perch. But she might with equal accuracy have hoped for the grace to be surprised, as for example Jill 's son-inlaw Leonard surprises her. Unsurprisability is probably what Amis likes in Wilson. Late in his career (H. 61–2) Wilson praised what Keats called ‘Negative Capability’, the opposite of déniaiserie. Keats ascribed to Shakespeare an ability not to know as a condition for creating character. Wilson's career, like that of his leading characters, can be seen as a partial movement away from the déniaisé, towards such negative capability, a movement that makes the later work incidentally both more individual and various and also less comic.

Broadly speaking, Wilson's short stories are, par excellence, the realm of ‘stereotypes’, the novels increasingly the realm of negative capability. The OED explains ‘stereotype’ as ‘something constantly repeated without change’, and cites 1850 for first usage. Repetition without change is Wilson's nightmare, and is what many of the stories anatomize as the condition of the post-war English, as subject to paralysis and death as Joyce's Dubliners. It is no accident thatWilson's first critical book was on Zola, a Socialist who nonetheless advanced a species of determinism.