Volume 3, Number 8 · December 3, 1964
The Damned
By Martha Cameron
The Inner Room
by Vera Randal
Knopf, 194 pp., $3.95
A fascination with the interior consciousness to the exclusion of social forms and relations and without reference to moral imperatives has enabled Vera Randal to produce a novel that is affecting and yet somehow fraudulent. Given her purpose—to expose the insane consciousness so that it will be understandable in its own terms—Miss Randal sometimes writes with sensibility. She describes the oppressive dislocation of the mentally ill but then bows out, leaving the reader holding the guts of her characters in his hands, without the faintest view of their destinies, their personalities, their conception of themselves, or the significance that their experience with insanity and mental hospitals has had and will have. There is little more to grasp in her book than a sense of a state of being, and little more to fathom than the bald fact that people go crazy and suffer. I quarrel with the way Miss Randal has fulfilled her purpose and I'm not sure that she really has written a novel after all.
Review, 1888 words
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