Volume 17, Number 7 · November 4, 1971
The Love that Dare Now Speak Its Name—in The New York Times
By Edgar Z. Friedenberg
On Being Different
by Merle Miller
Random House, 65 pp., $4.50
Years ago, after The Lost Weekend had become a best seller and a household word, Charles Jackson followed it up with The Fall of Valor, a novel about a professor who discovers in late middle age that he desires young men and falls in love with one in particular. His marriage dissolves almost as rapidly as a Bufferin tablet and he himself perishes shortly thereafter—of a heart attack, I think, though the convention of contemporary fiction would have called for suicide. It was a very dismal novel, and what I remember best about it was a comment by one reviewer that Jackson had done for homosexuality what he had earlier done for alcoholism: he had succeeded in making it middle-class.
Review, 1461 words
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