Volume 24, Number 4 · March 17, 1977
Up the River
By Robert Towers
Falconer
by John Cheever
Knopf, 211 pp., $7.95
A Place to Come To
by Robert Penn Warren
Random House, 401 pp., $10.00
America has as yet produced no important novelist who could, like Thomas Mann, publish his greatest work at the age of seventy-two and then go on to write a comic masterpiece based upon a fragmentary jeu d'esprit that had existed for more than forty years. Whatever the reasons adduced—thinness of the cultural humus, the isolation of individual talents, the parching glare of early success, periodic downpours of alcohol—our novelists tend to burn out or die off even sooner than our poets. At a much less Olympian level than Mann, the survival of a good American writer into his seventh decade with undiminished powers is sufficiently rare: one can hardly imagine an autumnally vigorous Scott Fitzgerald.
Review, 2998 words
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