In the Forests of the Night
By $2.50 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN
THIS is a story to trouble any young and sensitive reader. What troubles the not-so-young reader — who may be equally sensitive, but to slightly different things — is the fact that a young and sensitive writer should have had to write it. Gratuitously, no doubt impertinently, one feels concern and solicitude tor an author ot thirty who has to testify that the dominant influence of his life thus far is the war that ended when he was six, and who proves that it is so by his story of a shell-shocked man who existed as a moral sleepwalker from that war to this. The chief character is a forester working on a reclamation project of 1939 in northern Minnesota. His anodyne is a more and more uninhibited use of alcohol, to the point where he ignores his work, wrecks government property, is dismissed with no hope of another job anywhere, and suffers a complete psychic smash-up. His wife’s anodyne is abandonment to a cheap and sterile lust. Between them they would have managed to leave their seventeen-year-old son hopelessly adrift if he were an ordinary boy; as it is, small thanks to them, he has a steady compass within himself and will find his way through even the culminating horror that he is made to face alone. The story is told with skill, with promise: if it were not, the reader would experience much less solicitude tor the writer who had to live with it and to carry the burden it must have been. Clearly, it is a thing that a man would have to get off his chest and out of his system, on pain of going the way his characters go; and that, for a writer, would mean that it had to be written. Whether it had also to be published — that is not for the honest bystander to judge. W. F.