Reader's Choice

The new novel by WILLIAM FAULKNER, THE MANSION (Random House, $4.75), completes a trilogy, begun in 1925, whose previous parts were The Hamlet and The Town and whose subject is the rise of the abominable Snopes clan in Yoknapatawpha County. A prefatory note points out that “ there will be found discrepancies and contradictions in the thirtyfour year progress of this particular chronicle . . . due to the fact that the author has learned . . . more about the human heart than he knew thirty-four years ago; and is sure that, having lived with them that long, he knows the characters better than he did then.” Quite a few passages read like reminiscence and gossip about old acquaintances into whom one has acquired new insights. As he recapitulates events described in the preceding volumes, Faulkner in effect says: Here is something I hadn’t rightly understood about Eula Varner. Or: I was wrong in my explanation of why Flem Snopes framed his kinsman, Montgomery Ward, by planting moonshine whisky in his photographic studio. All of this will no doubt fascinate aficionados of Faulkner, but it is bound to be bewildering to readers not thoroughly familiar with the earlier installments of the saga.

The Mansion is a long, episodic novel, whose incidents are related by several narrators — V. K. Ratliff, the sewing-machine salesman, Montgomery Ward Snopes, Lawyer Gavin Stevens, and his nephew, Charles Mallison. At the opening in 1908, Mink Snopes, a puny, viperish, infinitely tenacious creature with a peculiar but unwavering code of his own, murders his rich neighbor over a dispute involving Mink’s cow. Because Flem, the only Snopes with enough influence to help him, fails to come to the rescue, Mink“ knows” that he must kill Flem when his twenty years are up. But his crafty cousin arranges for Montgomery Ward to land in the same prison so that he can bamboozle Mink into a doomed escape and another twenty years.

The second part focuses mainly on Linda Snopes (Flem’s wife’s illegitimate child) and Gavin Stevens. When The Town ended, in the late 1920s, Stevens had helped Linda to escape from the world of the Snopeses. In New York, she marries a Jewish sculptor, who enrolls her in the Communist Party and takes her to fight in the Spanish Civil War, in which he is killed. Linda, her hearing destroyed by an explosion, returns to Jefferson; and Faulkner dwells at length on the love between her and Stevens (sixteen years her senior) — a love which, for obscure reasons, precludes or transcends sex and marriage. Indeed, Linda makes Stevens promise that he will get married, and presently he does.

The climax takes place in 1946. Mink is finally released, through Linda’s intervention, and inexorably he carries out the killing for which he has waited thirty-eight years.

The Mansion is an uneven work. Parts of it are superb — especially those concerned with Mink, which are brilliantly narrated, extremely funny in a wryly humorous way, and curiously moving; Faulkner seems to feel for the reptilian Snopeses a much stronger compassion than he had displayed toward them in the past. The relationship between Linda and Stevens is tedious and at times unreal, and there are other stretches in the chronicle which I found weak, rambling, and digressive.

As I read The Mansion, I was reminded of Gide’s reply to someone who asked him who was France’s greatest poet: “ Victor Hugo. Alas!” What Gide meant was that, while recognizing Hugo’s greatness, he found his particular brand of genius highly unpalatable. Faulkner, by virtue of the elemental power and richness of his imagination, is almost certainly our greatest living novelist. But, alas, if one fails to be mesmerized by his voice and his vision, he is one of the most exasperating of writers — a point it has become as unfashionable to dwell on since he won the Nobel Prize as it once was to assert his importance. How tiresome is his habit of raising everything, as Alfred Kazin once put it, “to the tenth power,” so that an idiot’s love agony becomes“ starspawn and hieroglyph, the fierce white dying rose, then gradual and invincible speeding up to and into slack-flood’s coronal of nympholept noon.” How downright awful is some of his prose (see above), quite apart from the difficulties presented by his syntax. How bored one gets by his solemn game of mystifying the reader and by the portentous, oracular, incantatory tone of which he has become so fond. At his worst Faulkner reminds one of a discursive, pompous, hick-town bore, who has “got education” and loves to dramatize the local gossip by dressing it up in fancy talk and pseudo-philosophizing.

The American veneration of knowhow has had, I think, unfortunate consequences in the sphere of the novel, especially since the arrival of Hemingway. One can find in Hemingway’s fiction how-to-do-it treatises on fishing (river and deep-sea), bullfighting, big-game hunting, blowing a bridge, ordering a good dinner in Italy, generalship, and making love in a gondola. Sometimes these passages have an artistic raison d’être; not infrequently they are a gratuitous display of expertise. In any event, Hemingway’s great influence has, among other things, contributed to a preoccupation with technique which has led some writers to produce what might be labeled how-to-do-it novels. I cannot help feeling that THE WAR LOVER (Knopf, $5.00) by JOHN HERSEY belongs in this category: more than half of it is devoted to hour-by-hour descriptions, heavily laden with technical detail, of Flying Fortress raids on Germany. Now, Mr. Hersey is a gifted, honest, and conscientious writer, not at all the sort of novelist who would deliberately pad a book or show off his knowingness. He would, I presume, argue that the voluminous detail I have referred to is entirely relevant to his purpose, which has to do with the reactions of men to the stresses of war. The trouble is that much of the technical stuff is more or less meaningless to the layman, and therefore simply an encumbrance. This clutter has the effect of making The War Lover a plump novel in which, to my mind, a lean and better one is begging to be let out.

Mr. Hersey’s characters are the crew of a Flying Fortress based in England in 1943. His story is narrated by the copilot, Charles Boman, and it alternates between the bomber’s final, terrifying mission and an account of what has happened since the crew landed in England — its twenty-three previous raids and Boman’s love affair with an English girl called Daphne. The central tension is Boman’s admiration for and eventual disillusionment with the pilot, Buzz Marrow, an aggressive, foulmouthed, boastful egomaniac, who is a seeming hero and a genius at handling planes. From Daphne, who recognizes that Buzz is the same type as the dead R.A.F. pilot she once loved, Boman comes to understand that Buzz is a chronic liar and a man with a deep-seated fear of life. He is a hero in combat because secretly he delights in and lusts for annihilation.

The War Lover registers the point that wars exist because there are men like Buzz who revel in them, which is one way of saying that they are an expression of what Freud called “ the death urge.” This is an insight which Hcrsey could readily have dramatized without taking us on twenty-three bombing missions. Intermittently, his novel is extremely gripping and stirring, but as a whole I found it rather unsatisfying. The judges of the Book-of-the-Month Club think otherwise: they have made it their October selection.

TRIUMPH IN THE WEST (Doubleday, $6.75) by SIR ARTHUR BRYANT concludes a chronicle of World War II based principally on the diaries of Field Marshal Alanbrooke. It opens with the invasion of Italy and closes with Alanbrooke’s retirement in 1946.

As Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Alanbrooke was Britain’s most important military leader. He saw Churchill almost daily, and his diaries bring to us a unique and altogether unsparing picture of Churchill at work. Alanbrooke, the possessor of a relentlessly logical mind, believed that the essence of strategy was to keep one’s eye firmly fixed on decisive objectives and to pursue them with the maximum possible concentration of effort. He considered Churchill’s eagerness to engage the enemy anywhere and everywhere “a regular disease” and tenaciously resisted a succession of ventures dear to his formidable boss — attacks on Rhodes, the Andaman Islands, Sumatra. Their relationship was an unremitting verbal battle, but the C.I.G.S. and the Prime Minister had a deep respect and admiration for each other, and out of their clashing partnership there came, with astonishing smoothness, the ordered movements of a great national effort.

The other major theme of the diaries is conflict over strategy with the Americans. Alanbrooke insistently asserts that “the inexperience of the American High Command” was responsible for mistakes which delayed victory in Europe and threw away part of its fruits by senselessly surrendering territory to the Russians. The alleged mistakes he fought against were: first, failure to grasp the importance of and to support sufficiently the Italian campaign, whose purpose was to draw and keep Hitler’s strategic reserves south of the Alps; second, Eisenhower’s unwillingness to follow up the Normandy break-through with a single, overwhelming thrust at the Ruhr, which, according to German sources, could not have been stopped short of Berlin.

Alanbrooke’s critique of American leadership in Europe amplifies a thesis which has already been fought over by the military experts and is likely to remain a subject of controversy. What seems hardly debatable is that the diaries furnish impressive evidence of Alanbrooke’s acute intelligence, prescience, and common sense. At the Cairo and Teheran Conferences, he perceived how unrealistic were the discussions with the Chinese and the Russians; the nonsense he had listened to, he noted at one point, made him feel like entering “a lunatic asylum or a nursing home.” He rightly concluded that “ there was little to be hoped for from Chiang’s China.” Nor did he ever entertain any illusions about the Russians. The policy of soft-soaping them disgusted him, and he proved in his personal dealings with Stalin that more headway could be made by a tough, outspoken approach.

Alanbrooke’s diary was written as “an evening conversation on paper” addressed to his wife. Into it he poured the tensions and frustrations of a man, outwardly reticent and self-controlled, who was carrying a crushing burden of responsibility and was often tired beyond endurance. A journal which serves as an outlet for stress is bound to be, to some extent, a distorting mirror; and when Bryant’s earlier volume appeared, some critics argued that Alanbrooke had done himself and his country a disservice by allowing the diaries to be published. Granted that they are, in places, misleadingly colored by overstrain and grating to American sensibilities, I myself feel that their spontaneous, unguarded character makes them a singularly fascinating and revealing addition to the record. They document the conflicts within the Anglo-American alliance with an unparalleled candor, and they present to us an exceptionally intimate account — refreshingly free of gulf — of the discussions that governed the conduct of the war. They have the flavor of an “unauthorized” version of the events of which Churchill’s great history is the authorized British version.

Eighteen years ago, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World described the quality of life in a society of the remote future as “death without tears.” Judging from ALAN HARRINGTON’S LIFE IN THE CRYSTAL PALACE (Knopf, $4.50), the existence of today’s Organization Man already approximates this condition of dismal, sterile contentment. The Crystal Palace is one of America’s large corporations, and Mr. Harrington’s book is the result of a fouryear term in its public relations department.

The representative American corporation, Harrington suggests, “resembles nothing so much as a private socialist system.” It is “virtually impossible to be fired.” The annuity and insurance program guarantees a cozy future. You are fenced in by benevolence. Even if your powers decline and you become a “road block,” you are not likely to lose your status, for the Crystal Palace is prepared to lose a certain amount of money to protect its employees’ self-respect and demonstrate that length of service is properly appreciated. The Crystal Palace has abolished abject failure and glorious success and has made itself the Mediocre Man’s Protective League. The cardinal virtue is to do nothing that might “rock the boat.” Survival of the fittest has given way to survival of the most imitative.

The members of the Crystal Palace do not conform because of pressure, but by choice. Soothed by the beguiling music of security, they face the world with an all-purpose amiability. But perfect security has its price: loss of initiative, of will, of pride and desire — a sense of having allowed one’s wings to be clipped.

The fatuity of the Crystal Palace’s modus operandi is most apparent in its personnel department and in its public relations. The former is governed by the tyranny of preposterous forms and tests, derived from a pseudo scientism which assumes that the capacities of human beings can be measured in the same way as those of machines. The public relations program is chiefly aimed at pleasing top management and conveying to employees an irreproachable image of the corporation. In other words, the great corporations are busily and absurdly engaged in talking to themselves.

I am not qualified to judge the validity of Harrington’s picture, but much of it is certainly not new: W. H. Whyte’s books, The Organization Man and Is Anybody Listening?, and a number of other writings have conveyed to us a similar image of what is allegedly happening in the corporate world. The appeal of Harrington’s essay is that his personal findings constitute in effect a condensation and summation of what has been said in a variety of places, and they are presented in a telling and most readable manner. If what Harrington and other observers report is true, then our great corporations are certainly operating far below their possible level of efficiency.

There are two piercing ironies in the situation Harrington describes. Apparently the corporations have adopted a system which exposes them to many of the charges they have so zealously directed against socialism. Moreover, while crusading against “ creeping socialism” within the body politic, they seem to have allowed a form of socialism not to creep but to rush into their own citadel.

MOSS HART’S venture into autobiography, ACT ONE (Random House, $5.00), is altogether more substantial than the conventional theatrical memoir.

Mr. Hart has confined himself to the story of his youthful struggles, which were motivated by two compelling forces — hatred of poverty and a vision of Broadway as the Promised Land. His father was a cigar maker of English origin, and the son grew up in the Upper Bronx with “ the dark, brown taste of being poor” always in his mouth. A wildly eccentric aunt, with the pretensions of a grande dame, aroused in him a sense of the theater’s infinite glamour; and at fourteen he got a job as messenger boy to a producer known as “the King of the One Night Stands.” Presently young Hart found himself starring in a real-life version of soap opera. His boss suddenly lost the services of the author who dished out all the plays he sent on tour — she hit the jackpot with Abie’s Irish Rose. Hart promptly offered to bring the desperate impresario a fine drama by one Robert Arnold Conrad, and he proceeded to compose it in three nights. Miraculously, The Beloved Bandit not only delighted his employer (who forgave him his trickery) but found an enthusiastic backer who deemed it worthy of Broadway. The play flopped catastrophically in the tryout stage, and at eighteen Hart was “a fully-fledged failure.”

During the following six years, he wrote unproduced plays and worked as a social director in summer camps, rising to be “ King of the Borscht Circuit.” Though etched with loathing, his picture of the frenzied, uninhibited fife of these camps in the late 1920s is wonderfully fresh and funny.

The rest of the book (some 200 pages) is devoted to the long-drawnout and harrowing journey of his play Once in a Lifetime, through a collaboration with George Kaufman to success on Broadway. It is a good, frequently amusing tale of the dolors and doldrums of playwriting, rehearsals, and tryouts, but there is certainly much too much of it.

Mr. Hart has written with candor, vitality, and a lack of vanity rare in books about the theater. He speaks of himself as one of “the less honorably inspired” who finds highly satisfying “the mess of pottage that success offers.” This honesty gives his lively memoir a much greater solidity and human interest than one might expect in a success story of the commercial theater. Act One is a distinguished personal history.

Messages of welcome from Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West, and Sir Julian Huxley have greeted the reappearance, after an absence of some twenty years, of a character in American fiction with a genius for massacring the English language. The scene of his operations was the beginners’ class of the American Night Preparatory School for Adults in New York City, and this is where we meet him again in THE RETURN OF H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N (Harper, $3.50). Kaplan’s creator, who previously used the pseudonym Leonard Q. Ross, is LEO ROSTEN. Mr. Rosten’s witty preface emphasizes that the writing of dialect is never transcription, but creation—“the ‘accurate ear’ for which an author is praised is as inventive as it is accurate.”

The new Hyman Kaplan stories are as felicitously inspired and as funny as those in The Education of H*y*m*a*n K*a*p*l*a*n. Some of the veterans show up again in Mr. Parkhill’s class, and Mr. Pinsky is still loyally playing Sancho Panza to Kaplan’s Quixote and orderly to his Napoleon. Prominent among the newcomers, who introduce new factions and ethnic loyalties, are Olga Tarnova, “a sort of faded Cleopatra, floating down a Slavic Nile, lost in dreams of the days when men [were] maddened by her beauty,” and Gus Matsoukas, proudly aloof, as befits a Greek among barbarians.

The class’s tumultuous proceedings again treat us to an entrancing display of the ways in which the English language can be violated. All the characters commit delightful atrocities, but Kaplan towers above them — a Shakespeare of broken English. In Kaplanese, the plural of blouse is blice and that of sandwich is delicatessen, the opposite of height is lowth, and diameter is a machine for counting dimes. Our first President is Judge Vashington, the Chinese Generalissimo is Shanghai Jack, and the Atlantic and Pacific are linked by the Panama Kennel. Kaplan’s fractured eloquence reaches its heights in the historical lectures he gratuitously dispenses. Here is his version of a famous utterance by Patrick Henry: “Julius Scissor had his Brutis, Cholly de Foist had his Cornvall, an’ if Kink Judge got a bren in his had he vil make a profit from soch a sample! —Dat also epplies to Moscovitz.”

To compose a farce in a tone of mock formality, as HOWARD SHAW has done in THE CRIME OF GIOVANNI VENTURI (Holt, $3.95), is an undertaking which runs the risk of sounding forced or of slipping into the abyss of archness. Mr. Shaw has triumphantly circumvented these hazards, and his novel is a thoroughly delightful tour de force. The plot is ingenious; its comic possibilities are engagingly exploited; its outrageous improbabilities are made plausible enough to pass muster by the standards of farce.

Giovanni Venturi, a mild, placid, law-abiding bachelor in his early sixties, has for nearly thirty years operated with modest success a trattoria in the Trastevere quarter of Rome. Now he is suddenly confronted with ruin. A big-time restaurant chain with mass production methods and cut-rate prices opens a branch a few yards down the street, and no eating place within six blocks of a Uriti branch has ever survived its murderous competition. Giovanni’s closest friend, the bookseller next door, proposes to him an audacious plan for getting the better of his enemy. I must interject that Mr. Shaw has devised a combinazione which does credit to a Neapolitan operator, than whom there is no wilier. The idea is simply for Giovanni to arrange to feed his customers at Uriti’s expense. He will purchase the collaboration of the youth who operates the dumbwaiter in a corner of the Uriti kitchen, and then will dig a tunnel from his place to a point immediately below the dumbwaiter; thus he will be able to draw at will on his rival’s immense array of dishes, wines, and spirits.

Not only does the scheme work, but it has unforeseen consequences which carry Giovanni, temporarily, to sublime heights. In order not to arouse the suspicions of his unwitting provider, Giovanni serves fewer meals and has to turn away customers. This soon makes his trattoria the most fashionable in Rome and permits him to double his prices. Meanwhile, in the course of digging the tunnel, Giovanni has made a stupendous discovery: the sepulcher of Lars Porsena of Clusium and a priceless collection of Etruscan relics.

What follows is suspenseful as well as funny down to the last page. I cannot recall a more diverting light novel about Italians by an American writer.

Another item which I strongly commend to those who relish the comic spirit is THE FIRESIDE BOOK OF HUMOROUS POETRY (Simon and Schuster, $6.50), edited by WILLIAM COLE. Mr. Cole (some of whose humorous verse has appeared in the Atlantic) has put together a really superlative anthology which will defy competition for a long time to come. Offhand, I would have said that light verse was not something one would want to consume in large quantities at a single sitting, but four hours after I started dipping into Cole’s treasury I was still enjoying myself hugely. Its range and variety are prodigious. More than two hundred authors are represented with nearly five hundred poems, which run from a couple of lines to a couple of hundred. Every form of humorous verse is included — the parody, the jingle, the lampoon, the epigram and the epitaph, vers de société, a few limericks (so few are printable), the clerihew, lyrics from light opera; and every aspect of the comic Muse — farce, irony, wit, caprice, burlesque, satire, and highflown tomfoolery.

The golden ages of humorous poetry were the nineteenth century in England, which produced such great masters of the form as Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and W. S. Gilbert (as consistently witty as he was prolific), and the 1920s in the United States, which witnessed the flowering of, among others, Dorothy Parker, Don Marquis, and Franklin P. Adams. Today, the market for humorous verse is limited to a few magazines; the only practitioner who extracts a living from it is Ogden Nash. Still, the present and the recent past make a spirited showing in Cole’s anthology, with Morris Bishop (how brilliant he is!), R. P. Lister, A. P. Herbert, Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, P. G. Wodehouse (whose verse is as funny as his prose), the incomparable Ogden Nash, and many another gifted hand.

The masterpieces of comic poetry have naturally appeared in previous anthologies, but Cole has rightly included even the most familiar of them, for as an eminent anthologist has said: “The best is the best, though a hundred judges have declared it so.” About two thirds of Cole’s material has not been anthologized before, and it furnished me with a great many agreeable discoveries. Among them were parodies of Time and Life; C. W. V. Wordsworth’s “Song in Praise of Paella” (“Paella! Paella! Arroz by any other name would never smell as sweet”); Paul Dehn’s jauntily appalling nursery rhymes for the Atomic Age, one of which ominously begins, “Jack and Jill went up the hill/ To fetch some heavy water”; and William Cole’s Gilbertian comment on Dulles’ visit to the Premier of Burma, which goes in part: “He did not come to woo U Nu. . . . When reporters asked ‘A political coup?’ He waved them aside with a light ‘Pooh-Pooh.’ But he didn’t just come to admire the view, Which he certainly knew you knew, U Nu.”

Cole has grouped the poems in imaginative but at the same time orderly categories. His treasury is invitingly illustrated with comic drawings, some by poets — Chesterton, Lear, Nicolas Bentley — some by famous comic artists.

The most charitable summation I can make of POOR NO MORE (Holt, $5.95) by ROBERT ROARK is that it reads like a parody of John O’Hara at his embarrassing worst. Mr. Ruark’s bloated novel is about five times the length of the average book, and I cannot imagine that a man as remuneratively employed as he is would embark on so exhausting a work unless he were convinced he had something of consequence to say, which happens not to be the case. Unfortunately, Mr. Ruark’s literary ambitions have not deterred him from stuffing his novel with all of the vulgar ingredients conducive to box-office success: a ruthless, selfmade tycoon-hero who is irresistible to women; chronic boozing and reams of crude sex palaver; descriptions of visits to “21” and other landmarks on the map of Manhattan snobbery, with knowing allusions to the owners and the waiters; glimpses of real “celebrities” (Joe DiMaggio, Danny Kaye, Toots Shor); hoppedup vignettes of how the super-rich live; cynical platitudes about the way of the world (New York is a jungle; everybody is for sale); and a climax which manages to pay its respects both to right thinking and to cynicism by showing that the wages of power seeking are desolation and a heap of trouble — with a million dollars in Switzerland as a consolation prize.

The hero of Ruark’s saga, Craig Price, is a North Carolina boy born in 1916, the son of a bookkeeper hard hit by the depression. The benefactor who offers to help him through college dies suddenly, and he starts to earn his keep by acting as go-between in a bootlegging operation. At this point, the beauteous, worldly mother of his rich roommate fastens a lustful eye upon him, but though his flesh is oh, so willing, his honor is stronger, and he dashes off to sea. When he returns, having proved himself a terrific brawler, he is calculating enough to marry the sex-crazed daughter of his former benefactor to get his hands on her mill. A series of wizard business ploys project him into the tycoon class and onto the cover of Time while he is still in his early twenties. Already he knows so much about the dirt in high places in Washington (Lord knows how) that he gets a cushy job in the war and devotes himself to getting richer. Meanwhile, his marriage has become a shambles and he has acquired as his latest mistress a sexy dream woman who knows that he is an irresponsible stinker but loves him because she finds him — as clearly Ruark does — “a man in a world of boys.” This is precisely what he is not. He is instead a boozy, chronically unhappy, power-mad juvenile delinquent, whose idea of relaxing with the woman he loves is to pretend that he is still a sailor lad and she a “tart I picked up.”

Ruark, who is nothing if not smart, assumes on the surface a critical attitude toward his hero and allows nemesis to overtake him. In reality, his novel is another sleazy expression of that veneration for power which Orwell diagnosed as the malignant tumor of our age. I am forced to add that Ruark’s prodigious energy and slickness keep his narrative moving at a vigorous clip, and I can safely offer odds of ten to one that it will land on the bestseller list.

The setting of ONE HOUR (Harcourt, Brace, $5.00) by LILLIAN SMITH is a city in the South, in which an unpleasant but seemingly trivial incident touches off a chain reaction of evil. A little girl of eight, known to be a queer, neurotic child, tells her mother she has been attacked in a vacant store by a man who vaguely resembles her father, and she finally identifies him as Mark Channing, a brilliant, happily married scientist, engaged in cancer research. The narrator, David Landrum, a Protestant clergyman who has lost a leg in the war and who is Channing’s closest friend, is sure the child is lying. The police, too, doubt her story. But one of the town’s leading citizens insists that Charming be dropped from the Cancer Committee’s television program, because he has become a “controversial” figure.

Presently Susie’s mother, who is full of hostility for her husband, pressures him into swearing out a formal charge against Channing, which brings about Channing’s arrest. An anonymous letter to his son, away at school, causes the boy’s death, Landrum, a dedicated man who is doing all he can to help Channing, finds himself in love with his friend’s wife and is swept into an affair with her. And the town’s hatemongers erupt in an orgy of anti-intellectualism, climaxed by the murder of Landrum’s organist, who, as he faces the mob, discovers in himself the courage he has always felt so guilty for lacking.

In a succession of psychological unmaskings, Miss Smith reveals the complexities of her characters’ hidden motives and the subtleties of their relationships with remarkable sensitivity and insight. But she has made the mistake, I think, of posing too explicitly and insistently the age-old problem of the nature of good and evil. For the truths which fiction can convey are of a different order than the propositions of discourse, and any explicit answer which a novel makes to a problem — the answer, in this case, being that good and evil are inseparable, inextricably fused in the raw material of human destiny — is bound to be somewhat anticlimatic. The novel, like several others discussed here this month, seemed to be longer than was necessary. Fortunately, Miss Smith is a compelling storyteller, and despite the reservations just mentioned, I found her book moving and absorbing.