Recently, I read Iris Murdoch’s The Nice and the Good (1968). The style and the characters are very British, which was probably good for me since I prioritize American literature in my reading. I enjoyed this book’s appropriation of the “descent into hell” tradition when one of the characters, a Holocaust survivor, says the following:

I doubt if the descent into hell teaches anything new. It can only hasten processes which are already in existence, and usually this just means that it degrades. (283)