Two Straw Men and Gogol’s Ghost

The title of Wilfrid Sheed’s third novel leads us to believe that the Square has somewhere to go, upward, perhaps, like the Pilgrim, or downward, like the Rake. No such luck: the Square, oddly enough, moves in circles of the lost, vicious, and Connecticut variety. Mr. Sheed understands a Square to be one of the quietly desperate who has not mastered the rules of a fashionable game known to the wife as Culture or to certain professional manipulators as Being With It. To tag humanity as Square or Hip, Out or In, is, of course, to be inhuman; that is, a satirist. His theme is that of Maggie and Jiggs, or would be, if his Jiggs had a spine and loved his vulgarity. He doesn’t; he wobbles and doubts and frets; he even—God save this novel from insipidity—has to prove to himself that the hipsters are jerks.

Square’s Progress, by Wilfrid Sliced. Farrar, $4.95

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Guy Davenport

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The title of Wilfrid Sheed’s third novel leads us to believe that the Square has somewhere to go, upward, perhaps, like the Pilgrim, or downward, like the Rake. No such luck: the Square, oddly enough, moves in circles of the lost, vicious, and Connecticut variety. Mr. Sheed understands a Square to be one of the quietly desperate who has not mastered the rules of a fashionable game known to the wife as Culture or to certain professional manipulators as Being With It. To tag humanity as Square or Hip, Out or In, is, of course, to be inhuman; that is, a satirist. His theme is that of Maggie and Jiggs, or would be, if his Jiggs had a spine and loved his vulgarity. He doesn’t; he wobbles and doubts and frets; he even—God save this novel from insipidity—has to prove to himself that the hipsters are jerks.

Square’s Progress, by Wilfrid Sliced. Farrar, $4.95