Volume 11, Number 2 · August 1, 1968
I Don't Want to Go Home
By Jack Richardson
The Pursuit of Happiness
by Thomas Rogers
New American Library, 256 pp., $5.50
An Hour of Last Things
by George P. Elliott
Harper & Row, 292 pp., $5.95
Melinda
by Gaia Servadio
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 376 pp., $6.95
A curiosity of the American novel is the difficulty it seems to have producing young, adult protagonists. Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caulfield prove it can manage quite well up through late adolescence, but as soon as its young heroes enter their early twenties something happens to them: all oddities of character seem to fade away, intelligence atrophies, and instincts, without which they could never have survived childhood, desert them. They begin to brood, become tepidly cantankerous and puffed with a morality that, so far as the reader is aware, is completely unearned either through experience or revelation. Though they may be involved in a number of adventures, they are rarely active in them; rather, like Hemingway's Nick Adams, they are played upon by events until finally, if one listens carefully to the book's last pages, they give forth a tentative melody of their own.
Review, 2553 words
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