Volume 20, Number 13 · August 9, 1973
Last Testament
By John Thompson
Recovery
by John Berryman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 254 pp., $6.95
The confessions of John Berryman's last two books of poems, Love & Fame (1970) and the posthumous Delusions, Etc. (1972), are continued in the novel Recovery which he left unfinished when he killed himself in January, 1972. It is about as much a novel as those other last books are poems. They had lines and rhymes, and flashes of Berryman's verbal genius. Recovery has a sort of story in the progress of its confessions: confession is the chief method of treatment in the clinic for alcoholics that is its setting, confession repeated and repeated until, supposedly, some kind of purgation takes place. There is a hero, a figure called Dr. Alan Severance; there are other figures with other names, and there are flashes of the author's sharp intelligence and wit. But its plot, setting, characters, thought, or diction are scarcely even pieces of novelistic machinery in this book. They do not beguile us into revelation, we are spilled into it at once. The novel's reason for being, like that of the last two books of poems, is the author's confession. A prefatory note tells us,
Review, 2744 words
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