Stark “Morality”

tiful house, a poem built not with words,” was her successful book, do- ing very well. This contrasting new novel is conceived as a bare and stark “morality.” Begun during the bom- bardment of London, it seeks across an ocean and a continent and a cen- tury for a certain type of battle against circumstances, and a vision of the “nobility and bestiality of which human nature is capable.”

As a “morality,” the book is straight- forward and all right, but is not sur- prisingly profound or new. The twenty-two members of the fictional “Furmage Party,” who met their Sierra Pass disastrously after: the snows came, are not as subtly selected or interestingly matured a group as the one Thornton Wilder took to the Bridge of San Luis Rey. They are too few to strike even the average of normality of the real Donner Party, which was four times larger. Their past lives, whose telling takes a third of the book, are unreal, and have to be subjected to rather lurid and con- ventional “typing” before the trip begins. Not that such a wagon train would have been inhabited by a very likely group of characters; but these five wagons seem laden with an aver- age of melodramatic “pasts.”

PB

About the Author

Philip Burnham

tiful house, a poem built not with words,” was her successful book, do- ing very well. This contrasting new novel is conceived as a bare and stark “morality.” Begun during the bom- bardment of London, it seeks across an ocean and a continent and a cen- tury for a certain type of battle against circumstances, and a vision of the “nobility and bestiality of which human nature is capable.”

As a “morality,” the book is straight- forward and all right, but is not sur- prisingly profound or new. The twenty-two members of the fictional “Furmage Party,” who met their Sierra Pass disastrously after: the snows came, are not as subtly selected or interestingly matured a group as the one Thornton Wilder took to the Bridge of San Luis Rey. They are too few to strike even the average of normality of the real Donner Party, which was four times larger. Their past lives, whose telling takes a third of the book, are unreal, and have to be subjected to rather lurid and con- ventional “typing” before the trip begins. Not that such a wagon train would have been inhabited by a very likely group of characters; but these five wagons seem laden with an aver- age of melodramatic “pasts.”