Volume 8, Number 12 · June 29, 1967
The Way of Some Flesh
By John Wain
The Vendor of Sweets
by R.K. Narayan
Viking, 184 pp., $4.95
Delinquent Chacha
by Ved Mehta
Harper & Row, 115 pp., $3.95
The conflict of generations is always a tempting theme for the novelist, and particularly so in a time of cultural disintegration, when the traditional framework of beliefs and attitudes (represented by the father) can be shown at the moment of being destroyed by modernity (represented by the son). In England the rapid social changes involved in the passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century produced such father-and-son masterpieces as Clayhanger and The Diary of a Nobody, which have a richness of texture impossible in our time when fathers have no more memory of religious and social tradition than sons have.
Review, 1449 words
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