418
PARTISAN REVIEW
that the soldier comes into their lives at a climactic point, that they are
all of phenomenal articulateness, enjoy great freedom in discourse, and
that the play of emotional atmosphere is of a wartime compression, makes
all this seem possible, and even persuasive. The narrator himself is a
kind of invisible man, through whom we see the sharp personalities of
his sudden friends, and a country life routine that has an authority
arising from both perception and love. The virtues of the book lie almost
entirely
in
the quality of feeling, and the very pleasant and literate hand–
ling of the language, notable for its cadence and sensuous impressionism.
We move from this novel, which has a certain moral, semi-intellec–
tual climate, however inadequate, to a job at once more solid and more
tenuous. William Maxwell, in this inexorable pursuit of the progress of a
compulsive emotional attachment between two adolescent boys, has given
us also the picture of collegiate America, and of fumbling, insecure
adults. The publication of this novel has occasioned a small ecstasis
in
the more frequent press. In one way it
is
an impressive piece of work, for
Mr. Maxwell is a very careful, incisive, and conscious writer, who scorns
to throw words about brightly for a big effect. Instead, moving about his
characters on little cat feet, he proceeds to keep an honest and some–
times acute record of this relationship, in itself neither unusual nor of
profound interest, and manages, both by an exploration of its wider
implications and by a genuine tenderness, to command considerable at–
tentiveness and interest.
His narrative method is in the main naturalistic,-he operates in the
tradition of a type of
N ew Yorker
story which we are all too fami–
liar, a type which Mr. Maxwell has openly admired and which, in
hi~
role as an editor of that magazine, he has presumably encouraged. The
tone is very matter-of-fact, and details of decor, habit, gesture are in–
vested with fairly enormous psychological significance (for reasons not
always cogent) in a great, deliberate buildup to an often very minor
irony or perception. It is a standardized formula for subtlety.
It
is a
pity that Mr. Maxwell, whose writing has a nice, unadorned straight–
forwardness and intelligence, should so falter in some of his most im–
portant accessory figures and in his jejune denouement, in which we are
asked to believe in a victory of maturity and independence that arise,
from an act of the opposite nature.
Stephen Seley's
The Cradle Will Fall
is a book of tiny proportion,
making no pretensions to a larger than personal view, and yet, in his
urgency to record the special mark made on the psyche of a child by the
death of his mother, he catches the family and milieu (lower middle–
class Jewish) with sharpness and even some freshness. Though he has
immersed himself rather prodigiously in the emotions of a boy in be–
wilderment and first loss, this is more an emotional tour de force than a
literary achievement; we may grudgingly acknowledge its hundred accu–
racies, but wish for something which engages the mind more fully
