474
PARTISAN ·REVIEW
qualification of the laughable that gives Perelman's humor distinction.
For a sense of incongruity is an aspect of the poetic principle, and just
as the e?et reinstates the relevance that exists in irrelevancies the
humorist reinstates the irrelevancies that exist in relevance.
there is one criticism to which
Crazy Like
a:
ox
1s susceptible, it
is that it is a book. The forty-five short pieces that constitute it tempt
the re:1der into taking large gulps of something that is most beneficial
taken in small swallows. The themes are varied; the surprises fresh. But
each piece is compounded of a sameness of attack and of equal parts
of wit, paradox:, fantasy and overturned cliche.
Read in easy stages,
Crazy Like a Fox
is first-rate humor, the truly
comic, that ever sought-after blossom of the nettle.
?
~H~~VEY
BREIT
ICTION
BOSTON ADVENTURE.
By
Jean Stafford. Harcourt) Brace.
$2.75
T
His
unusual and absorbing first novel will pose a problem to those
who hold that the artist may not isolate himself from the major con–
cerns of his time. For
Boston Adventure
in the year
1944
is something
of a freak: it deals neither with battle front nor home front, nor' with
the war or its causes in any possible sense whether indirect, analogical,
or symbolic. Neither is it concerned with racial issues, juvenile delin–
quency, the new failure of nerve, or any other recognizable special prob–
lems of the day. Indeed the conversational references to Roosevelt and
the New Deal seem distinctly out of place; but for the rather special
fact that the nineteenth century in Boston will not lie down, it might be
questioned whether it dealt with the twentieth century at all.
That the portrait of the upper ranges of Boston society is quietly
blistering is certainly true; perhaps there may be a defense along the
lines of Spender's discovery that Henry James concerned himself with
the international elite only to immerse their society "in the destructive
element." But that would be to limit severely the range of the book's
value: the Bostonians with whom the book deals are a very special
group, by no means easily seen as typical of any larger class. Even the
destructiveness of the element is open to doubt; from ' the point of view
of the critic the destruction is doubtless thorough, but from the point
of view of the grip of the society itself the novel serves rather to em–
phasize its tenacity.
It may even be doubted whether those parts of the book are best
which best follow the critical formula. Of the two characters whom
we chiefly see being shaped by their environment it is certainly Hope–
still Mather, the born but rebellious patrician, who better illustrates
what a recent critic in PARTISAN REviEw called "the malformation. of
