Books in Brief: The Great Dethriffe

THE GREAT DETHRIFFE, by C. D. B. Bryan (Dutton, 252 pp., $6.50). Five years have passed since the appearance of C. D. B. Bryan’s first novel, P. S. Wilkinson, a creditable work which showed that he was already a master realist with almost the skill of John O’Hara in rendering dialogue and almost the polish of J. P. Marquand in designing flashbacks; to these talents he added his own extraordinary ability for making use of historical and public events and detailing their effects on private lives. In his second novel Bryan has improved his flashback and dialogue techniques but has forsaken any attempt to describe the impact of historical events on personal affairs. Instead, he has set out to investigate the collision of Fitzgerald’s fictional world of the Twenties with Bryan’s fictional but realistic world of the Sixties. The Great Dethriffe, then, is Bryan’s attempt to portray George Dethriffe’s quest to capture something of the apparent glamor of the Gatsby era in his own life; Dethriffe of course fails to sustain his elegant private vision, but Bryan succeeds in evoking both the glamorous and sordid sides of the Gatsby legend. But this is not a successful novel; Bryan, like Gatsby, loses control of events in the end, and the book ultimately fails.