Bold Yea-Saying

Perhaps the best service that a reviewer of Glenport, Illinois can do its possible purchasers is to warn them of what they will not find in it. They will not find crime, alcoholism, drug addiction, juvenile delinquency, political corruption, homosexuality, Communism, Fascism, psychoanalysis, pleas for academic freedom or loyalty hearings. They will not find more than a modicum of sex, and that treated without prurience or clinical detail, or more than a mere shadow of racial prejudice, and that projected lightly across the fringes of the narrative. In short, readers of Glenport, Illinois will be sorely disappointed if they come to it looking for a fashionable novel.

Indeed, Mr. Boles is so unfashionable that he writes of American life, not as one who feels a sense of intellectual alienation from it, but as one whose roots are deep in the soil of his country, and as one who draws strength and happiness from that soil. He is unfashionable enough to believe that the American dream, far from being dead or discredited, is still a living, invigorating force. He is unfashionable enough—in an age when so many novelists are inspired by the spirit that denies—to be, through the mouths of his characters, a bold Yea sayer. He is unfashionable enough to celebrate the wonder of daily living, the mere facts of the workaday world; unfashionable enough to dwell on what Lewis Mumford, writing of Renoir in a passage recently quoted by John Chamberlain, has called the “relaxed, sunlit moments whose immediate reward is grace, laughter, ecstasy, and animal health.”

BR

About the Author

Ben Ray Redman

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Perhaps the best service that a reviewer of Glenport, Illinois can do its possible purchasers is to warn them of what they will not find in it. They will not find crime, alcoholism, drug addiction, juvenile delinquency, political corruption, homosexuality, Communism, Fascism, psychoanalysis, pleas for academic freedom or loyalty hearings. They will not find more than a modicum of sex, and that treated without prurience or clinical detail, or more than a mere shadow of racial prejudice, and that projected lightly across the fringes of the narrative. In short, readers of Glenport, Illinois will be sorely disappointed if they come to it looking for a fashionable novel.

Indeed, Mr. Boles is so unfashionable that he writes of American life, not as one who feels a sense of intellectual alienation from it, but as one whose roots are deep in the soil of his country, and as one who draws strength and happiness from that soil. He is unfashionable enough to believe that the American dream, far from being dead or discredited, is still a living, invigorating force. He is unfashionable enough—in an age when so many novelists are inspired by the spirit that denies—to be, through the mouths of his characters, a bold Yea sayer. He is unfashionable enough to celebrate the wonder of daily living, the mere facts of the workaday world; unfashionable enough to dwell on what Lewis Mumford, writing of Renoir in a passage recently quoted by John Chamberlain, has called the “relaxed, sunlit moments whose immediate reward is grace, laughter, ecstasy, and animal health.”