BOOKS
561
-A SEC 0 ND NOV EL
SET THIS HOUSE ON FIRE.
By
Willillm Styron. Rllndom' House.
$5.95.
In 1951 William Styron published his first novel,
Lie
Down in Darkness.
It made a durable mark; failing to stimu–
late the mind, it nevertheless haunted, as though the dark shadow
of a large hand hovered over the heart, affecting one with a
sense of calamity and doom (and gloom). Immature in some ways
(the novelist was still in his twenties), the book insinuated, en–
circled, herded the attuned reader into an emotional experience
that shattered tranquil days long after the last pages were a faint
memory. It somehow hung on, in spite of ratiocinative dismissals.
Power, the capacity to construct powerful equivalents in fiction of
what was his idea of the world, was then Mr. Styron's striking
gift, his most remarkable virtue.
Now nine years later Mr. Styron's second full length novel
comes to us-but what a nine years it has been! What an unholy,
inactive lot we were during that time. Bitter, cynical, indifferent,
supine, momentous events proceeded without us, the world ad–
vanced
in
spite of us, life ebbed and flowed in vast movements
while we loafed on beaches and
in
television rooms. How sad for
most of us, who rode out our nation's unconnection, remaining
unconnected, solitary, alien, complacent. Yet for a "happy few"
this evil time was transformed into an auspicious time in which
to mature. How can this come about? Some human law has to
be operative: the complacent chorus breeding the anxious solo,
the organization tentacles missing the corners where individuals
were at work on their own idiosyncratic tasks; "And on a heath
beneath winking stars a fox with merciless bright eyes scraped in
the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and
scraped."
For me, who may be only a poor minority,
Set This House
on Fire
is an immeasurable gain in maturity over the author's fine
first novel, though I would not know how to calculate those nine
years of growing up. Because of the rapidity and intensity of the
upheavals in the world; because of their instantaneous relevance
