Joy Is Taboo

Reading four of the new novels— Ourselves to Know, John O’Hara (Random House, $4.95); Two Weeks in Another Town, Irwin Shaw (Random House, $4.95); The Center of the Green, John Bowen (McDowell, Obolensky, $3.50); The Sea Change, Elizabeth Jane Howard (Harper, $3.95)—makes a reviewer feel like a sports reporter single-handedly trying to cover a sexual Olympics. Notebook in hand, he stands in the midst of a polyglot horde of competitors, all straining for the starter’s gun. In few places outside of brassiere advertisements is there such singleminded and appallingly humorless concentration upon sex.

John Bowen, in sharply-etched prose, depicts characters who lack neither jobs nor minimum creature comforts, and who find it impossible to organize themselves to meet daily living. One of the heroes in The Center of the Green indulges in compulsive—and extremely unattractive—satyriasis. Another, after an ineffectual suicide attempt, is left to the tender mercies of Group Therapy. Here are the real hollow men, fifteen years after the end of World War Two; freed from Angst over making a living, they are completely unable to make a life, shifting their burdens to other, convenient shoulders.

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Georg Mann

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Reading four of the new novels— Ourselves to Know, John O’Hara (Random House, $4.95); Two Weeks in Another Town, Irwin Shaw (Random House, $4.95); The Center of the Green, John Bowen (McDowell, Obolensky, $3.50); The Sea Change, Elizabeth Jane Howard (Harper, $3.95)—makes a reviewer feel like a sports reporter single-handedly trying to cover a sexual Olympics. Notebook in hand, he stands in the midst of a polyglot horde of competitors, all straining for the starter’s gun. In few places outside of brassiere advertisements is there such singleminded and appallingly humorless concentration upon sex.

John Bowen, in sharply-etched prose, depicts characters who lack neither jobs nor minimum creature comforts, and who find it impossible to organize themselves to meet daily living. One of the heroes in The Center of the Green indulges in compulsive—and extremely unattractive—satyriasis. Another, after an ineffectual suicide attempt, is left to the tender mercies of Group Therapy. Here are the real hollow men, fifteen years after the end of World War Two; freed from Angst over making a living, they are completely unable to make a life, shifting their burdens to other, convenient shoulders.