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Authors: Elizabeth Jane Howard
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is secretly frozen brimstone.
Through the Fields of Clover
by
Peter de Vries
July 1961
Reading this book after Lanterns and Lances one cannot help noticing the change in generation - it is more than the outlook of personality: where Mr. Thurber uncovers people as absurd, but seems to regard the absurdity as a particle of man as a whole, Mr. de Vries is more active, and savage and personal. He too uncovers people as absurd, but there is the suggestion that they are particular people and nobody ought to be like that. He is far more divided in his feelings about his material - so much so, that this novel seemed to be in two halves. In the first half he is occupied with a comparatively detached account of the goings on (in connection with a wedding anniversary) of a collection of people who come out like caricatures - good ones, they bear a distinct resemblance to people - bold, angled line drawings of their most laughable facets; in the second half it is as though, whether he likes it or not, he has got to know them, and a certain amount of humanity - his own and theirs - creeps into the tale. This made the second half of the book much better than the first, as to me, while anything might be a laughing matter, nothing is only that, and if people are simply unadulteratedly silly, they end up by making me feel sad: in the same way that no painter has managed to draw any animal well if he has felt for it nothing but ridicule, I do not think that any writer of fiction can deal with people if he finds them entirely and simply preposterous because it just is not all that people ever are.
The jacket of this book (oh dear, these jackets!) insists so frantically on the funniness of Mr. de Vries that one gets a block about that word, but yes, it is funny, and sharp, and observant, and slick, and in the character of Prufrock - with whom he seems most to identify himself - he has made somebody of more than two dimensions: Prufock, half Red Indian, and a writer for a TV comedian, collects people like birds’ eggs, and is despairingly aware of his lack of real response, until eventually he collects a girl who, so to speak, looks like hatching. There are a quantity of more distant characters, including a marriage counsellor, who reminded me rather too much of Mr. Trexter’s doctor in The Second Tree from the Corner . There is no need to tell the story, because it isn’t the point of this kind of book, but it is a perfectly good line on which to hang this galaxy of unconscious eccentrics.
Latitudes of Love
by
Thomas Doremus
August 1961
Some novelists write about ordinary and general circumstances and rely upon their characters’ reactions to provide the extraordinary element; there are others who create extraordinary circumstances in order to expose general - or universal - reactions and emotions. This singular, brilliant, confounding little novel is of the second kind, and before I start upon its matter, I must say that it is written with astonishing simplicity and force, and the result is both direct and fastidiously discriminating.
An American boy, fifteen when the book opens, is ‘adopted’ by a very rich couple called Bill and Mary, and with them lives a life of dazzling sophistication and opulence. He is narcissistic, cynical, precocious, highly intelligent, with a cold heart and a restless mind, and he makes the most of the situation afforded him. Then Bill asks him to go to Europe - without Mary - whom they leave in New York. Bill is dying of cancer, and Hector finds himself inexorably drawn into responsibilities which cannot be handled at all without emotion, and where the emotion required is painfully mature. They spend a winter in Paris, and Hector arrives through love to some understanding of the man he is waiting to lose. When it is over, he returns to America and sends himself back to school. On the face of it, this is not a pretty story: the rich, heavy, hard-drinking, rather dull man who has made good and
Through the Fields of Clover
by
Peter de Vries
July 1961
Reading this book after Lanterns and Lances one cannot help noticing the change in generation - it is more than the outlook of personality: where Mr. Thurber uncovers people as absurd, but seems to regard the absurdity as a particle of man as a whole, Mr. de Vries is more active, and savage and personal. He too uncovers people as absurd, but there is the suggestion that they are particular people and nobody ought to be like that. He is far more divided in his feelings about his material - so much so, that this novel seemed to be in two halves. In the first half he is occupied with a comparatively detached account of the goings on (in connection with a wedding anniversary) of a collection of people who come out like caricatures - good ones, they bear a distinct resemblance to people - bold, angled line drawings of their most laughable facets; in the second half it is as though, whether he likes it or not, he has got to know them, and a certain amount of humanity - his own and theirs - creeps into the tale. This made the second half of the book much better than the first, as to me, while anything might be a laughing matter, nothing is only that, and if people are simply unadulteratedly silly, they end up by making me feel sad: in the same way that no painter has managed to draw any animal well if he has felt for it nothing but ridicule, I do not think that any writer of fiction can deal with people if he finds them entirely and simply preposterous because it just is not all that people ever are.
The jacket of this book (oh dear, these jackets!) insists so frantically on the funniness of Mr. de Vries that one gets a block about that word, but yes, it is funny, and sharp, and observant, and slick, and in the character of Prufrock - with whom he seems most to identify himself - he has made somebody of more than two dimensions: Prufock, half Red Indian, and a writer for a TV comedian, collects people like birds’ eggs, and is despairingly aware of his lack of real response, until eventually he collects a girl who, so to speak, looks like hatching. There are a quantity of more distant characters, including a marriage counsellor, who reminded me rather too much of Mr. Trexter’s doctor in The Second Tree from the Corner . There is no need to tell the story, because it isn’t the point of this kind of book, but it is a perfectly good line on which to hang this galaxy of unconscious eccentrics.
Latitudes of Love
by
Thomas Doremus
August 1961
Some novelists write about ordinary and general circumstances and rely upon their characters’ reactions to provide the extraordinary element; there are others who create extraordinary circumstances in order to expose general - or universal - reactions and emotions. This singular, brilliant, confounding little novel is of the second kind, and before I start upon its matter, I must say that it is written with astonishing simplicity and force, and the result is both direct and fastidiously discriminating.
An American boy, fifteen when the book opens, is ‘adopted’ by a very rich couple called Bill and Mary, and with them lives a life of dazzling sophistication and opulence. He is narcissistic, cynical, precocious, highly intelligent, with a cold heart and a restless mind, and he makes the most of the situation afforded him. Then Bill asks him to go to Europe - without Mary - whom they leave in New York. Bill is dying of cancer, and Hector finds himself inexorably drawn into responsibilities which cannot be handled at all without emotion, and where the emotion required is painfully mature. They spend a winter in Paris, and Hector arrives through love to some understanding of the man he is waiting to lose. When it is over, he returns to America and sends himself back to school. On the face of it, this is not a pretty story: the rich, heavy, hard-drinking, rather dull man who has made good and
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