The Great Promise

NOEL HOUSTON, the author of The Great Promise, is described as a former newspaper reporter and prize-winning dramatist. Evidence of both writing activities can be found in this book, his first novel. It is the reporter who presents the background details of the government land lottery in pioneer Oklahoma Territory, where Sawyer Bolton, “a girl uncomplicated and awakened to strong emotion,” after some singular misadventures, wins “the promise of a new life.” Because of her youth and inexperience, Sawyer snarls up the fulfillment of the promise, and events go from very bad to much worse until she wins a new promise, no doubt the great one. It is the playwright who has constructed the Hollywood scenario; but neither he nor the reporter — nor both - has succeeded in writing an effective novel.

The missing ingredient is imagination — imagination powerful enough to invest sets and properties with the reality of place and thing, and to convert stagy automatons into credible human beings. Not one person in the book possesses the substance of a living man or woman, or the passion and complexity of even the simplest human being. Sawyer (“one of the most exciting heroines in contemporary fiction” — advt.) for all her “beauty ” and “strong emotion” is a completely manipulated, incomparably dull, incomparably vacuous woman. And the action she engages in is trite and as essentially vulgar as she.

The publishers contend in advertisements that 50,000 copies of this book have been printed, which indicates either a degeneration of reading taste or the discovery of a new public who will read anything and come up smiling.

BERNARD MALAMUD