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419
One may even, perhaps, think of this book as a literary sneeze,-it is
natural, normal, probably a relief to Mr. Seley; whether it
portend~
something more significant, whether it is to have context in a career,
it is too early to tell.
LeGarde S. Doughty's
The Music Is Gone
is about a Southern coun–
try
doctor, thoughtful, honest, intransigent and gentle (a familiar mold)
and though it has a thin single line of story, it is essentially made up of
a series of those colorful incidents in the life of a doctor, told in good,
homey, placid style. It is not only too late for this
kind
of thing to be
given out as a serious novel, but
as
an individual work it suffers from
a disastrous paucity of interest, wit and pace, and an overabundance
of sentimentality, bad taste and nonsense.
Richard Brooks' angry intentions promise more than he furnishes.
In his preface he is all wrought up about the state of tension and disinte–
gration of soldiers at camps in the United States, and approaches his
thesis with the air of a man who fully understands the spiritual brutality
of the existing conditions in what might be called that non-world, but
his book
is
mostly fast melodrama with sensational elements, that is only
remotely related to his stated purpose. It has a certain raucous excite–
ment, and a grimness of determination not to avoid the ugly and perverse,
but, documented and fervent though it may
be,
it is not good.
Darkly The River Flows
is very fancy and funny, though the author
himself, his characters and situations, have not a grain of humor. All is
stark and terrible, all grandiose psychopathology and no intelligence, yet
with a woof of fierce romance that makes it essentially a love story. Lt.
Macdonald, who must surely make lists of colorful emotive words
pour
le sport,
tells the story of two brothers and their neurotic conflicts. One
rides people as he rides his wild horse, the other cringes and sulks, finally
expressing his sickness by a symbolic sexual possession of his long-dead
mother. The Lieutenant has gone to a progressive school, but he is
a
little naive about telling us what he learned there of reeling and writhing.
GEaTRUDE
BucKMAN
