694
PARTISAN REVIEW.
realistic, suggestive, nightmarish drama finally ends in loose allegory,
or so I construed it. What the novel is about seems to be that old business
of the modern little man caught between forces he can neither fight nor
understand. Charlie Bell, the near-middle-aged crossing tender, finds
himself involved in murder, political shenanigans, and subsequent flight
and pursuit. None of it is his doing. He knows, finally, nothing at all–
who is chasing whom and why is a question that he at last ceases to
ask. Mr. Wagoner apparently wants to suggest the horror of Charlie
Bell's position and the horror of modern urban life. At first he does so
with remarkable success. After he has rung a good many changes on
this theme, however, interest begins to fail. The final portion of the
book-the mad, macabre flight with Ada- takes us into a world of
symbol and allegory and loses us there. Nonetheless, this is an auspicious
beginning of Mr. Wagoner's. He has a good, muscular style, a sense of
place and
things
as well as of people. Both he and Mr. Bowen have
talent; more than that, they have access to a world.
Louis O. Coxe
