FICTION CHRONICLE
FALSE COIN. By Horvey Swodos. Atlontic, Little Brown.
$4.
PURSUIT OF THE PRODIGAL. By Louis Auchincloss. Houghton
Mifflin. $3.75.
THE BODY'S CAGE. By Benjomin DeMott. Atlontic, Little Brown.
$4.
THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY. By Flonnery O'Connor. Forror,
Strous ond Cudohy. $3.75.
Harvey Swados's
False Coin
is one of those solemn,
overwrought, testimonial novels which annoy the more frivolous
critics without quite reaching over their heads to the wise grey polls
whose favor is being courted. I am going to be uncharitable to Mr.
Swados on Hamlet's debatable theory that sometimes you need to
be cruel to be kind. Otherwise the abused idealism that
False Coin
personifies will only be worse compounded.
Among other things, it sets out to be nothing less than a
contemporary version not only of
The Blithedale Romance
but also
of Trilling's
The Middle of the Jou rney.
It is
the
super-ego novel
of the season, muscle-bound with high moral purpose, dripping
with honest intellectual sweat. Here, for example, is the teen–
age son of a Central European sociologist (successor to the
Central European artists and psychologists of an earlier day)
describing his father:
Thor shook his head violently. He said, without looking at
me, "I couldn't hate him, not when I admire so much about him.
I admire his systematic mind, and the way he can put aside per–
sonal considerations when he's involved in a research problem. I
admire him for
his
scientific neutrality."
But of course Thor
does
hate his father, little monster of
perverted rationalism that he is, and eventually commits an im–
pressive triple suicide by swallowing sleeping pills, cutting his
wrists and drowning himself in a bathtub. Thor is one of the more
likable agents caught up and crushed in the juggernaut of ration–
alized liberalism which Mr.
Swad~,
following
his
distinguished
models rather than his natural instincts, has obliged himself to
despise, which he bodies forth as an elaborately implausible scheme
