Volume 7, Number 10 · December 15, 1966
Serious Ladies
By Charles Thomas Samuels
Dark Places of the Heart
by Christina Stead
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 352 pp., $6.95
The Collected Works of Jane Bowles
by Jane Bowles, introduction by Truman Capote
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 431 pp., $6.95
Journal from Ellipsia
by Hortense Calisher
Little, Brown, 375 pp., $5.95
Like The Man Who Loved Children, Miss Stead's first book in nearly two decades is mainly a set of characterizations developed through resourceful dialogue. Since the earlier novel concentrated on a family a general theme unavoidably materialized, though the willingness of some critics to take the Pollits as the essential modern family can almost be taken as slander. Miss Stead seemed to be raising social issues, both in Sam's patronizing behavior to the natives on his Malayan trip and in the class warfare lying beneath the Pollit's horrible mismating. Yet what one remembers from this novel are not its thematic qualities but Henny's tirades and Sam's nauseating baby-talk.
Review, 2266 words
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