Boo k s
IN AND OUT OF THE WAR
T
HE PERPETUAL
gloom in which book reviewers, like blind fish, go
about their business may soon deprive them of all power to discrimi–
nate among virtues and leave them with nothing more than a rudimen–
tary sense of the hierarchy of faults. So when I say that Alex Comfort's
The Power H ouse
is the best of the novels on my list;* I mean that its
faults are of a high order. Genuine literary blemishes, in a perspective
as dim and vacant as the present, acquire a surrogate beauty, vindicated
by default. No recent novel by a young writer has been so serious and
ambitious in its effort.
Comfort takes naturalism so literally that he makes it look like
something else. He is apparently aware that he is going over trodden
ground, and that he cannot simply follow his predecessors with straight
face and solemn fidelity. He therefore loads his document with all the
weight it can bear, as if to justify his presence in a school by outdoing
the masters. Thus, when he writes of the textile industries in pre-war
France, the war, the rout and the aftermath, it is with an exhaustive
documentation, no stone unturned, no sound or movement overlooked,
the misplaced laboriousness of an industrial accountant who takes an
inventory to be a history of culture.
Fougueux, the novel's first protagonist, is an engineer, master of
La Virginie, the machine that distributes power through the textile
mills. Comfort's purpose is to show the complete dominance of the
metal woman, the monstrous power engine, over the man who tends
her, and by extension, the domination of the entire modern industrial
plant over culture, country and countryside. Fougueux su:ffers from
psychic impotence induced by several unsuccessful sexual attempts in
his early adolescence and reinforced by repeated failures as a n adult.
He lives in fear of incompetence (death in the factory, ridicule in life),
fear of not being able to meet the demands of a woman and his whole
sexual slHisfaction is derived symbolically from his success in meeting
the demands of a machine. La Virginie becomes a sexual thing down
to the touch and odor of her body, a woman riveted in a bed of in–
cessant activity, a complete erotic object whose very sounds, when some
*
THE PowER HousE.
By Alex Comfort. Vikin g Press.
$3.
APARTMENT IN
ATHENS.
By Glenway Wescott. Harper.
$2.50.
AoE OF THUNDER.
By Frederic
Prokosch . Harper.
$2.50.
THE END OF ALL M EN.
By C. F. Ramuz. Pantheon.
$2.50.
THE GHOSTLY LovER.
By Elizab eth Hardwick. Harcourt.
$2.50.
CANNERY
Row.
By John Steinbeck. Viking Press.
$2.
