Volume 3, Number 2 · September 10, 1964
Only in America
By Julian Moynahan
Children and Others
by James Gould Cozzens
Harcourt, Brace & World, 343 pp., $5.95
Sometimes a Great Notion
by Ken Kesey
Viking, 628 pp., $7.50
James Gould Cozzens's serious critical reputation has been shaky since the publication of By Love Possessed in 1957 and this collection of seventeen stories, many published in Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post during the 1930s, will do nothing to strengthen it. He does not know much about how to secure the effects of economy and epiphany characteristic of the modern short story since Chekhov; the writing is as stiff and flat as a board; the backward-looking, fine-old-American-family prejudices are harder to ignore in a brief tale than in a long novel, possibly because in the former each sentence has to do more work.
Review, 1506 words
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