Volume 5, Number 8 · November 25, 1965
Queen for a Day
By Bernard Bergonzi
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling
by Marguerite Young
Scribners, 1198 pp., $10.95
Totempole
by Sanford Friedman
Dutton, 141 pp., $5.95
The Nightclerk
by Stephen Schneck
Grove, 206 pp., $4.95
If I were Charles Scribner's Sons I think that I would be feeling pretty nervous about publishing a first novel that took seventeen years to write, came to 3449 pages of typescript, and, in book form, weighs three-and-a-quarter pounds. Hence, doubtless, the unusual volume of publicity material that accompanied the review copy of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, including a photograph of Miss Young delivering that mighty pile of typescript, and two pages of advance comments on the novel, all of them, in principle, favorable, ranging from the full-throated ecstatic to the mildly approbatory. The idea is, I suppose, to present this novel as an immediate 'classic,' with the underlying implication: 'This has got to be a work of great literary genius (or else why have we sunk so much capital into it?).' Such faith in a really rather outlandish product is admirable and even touching; but I think they are right to feel nervous.
Review, 1669 words
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