REALITY IN SHADOW

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 462, 30 April 1948, Page 10

REALITY IN SHADOW

THE IDOLS OF THE CAVE, By Frederic Prokosch. Chatto and Windus. HIS novel is not quite a satire and not quite a steady study of manners in darkest war-time New York. It is, in fact, not quite-not quite anything. The novelist seems to strike no final balance between satire and delineation. It has great merits. It is lively. It is full of excellent minor characters all firmly and delicately sketched-some of them what E. M. Forster called "flat" characters, people identifiable by one set mannerism oor one constantly repeated action or speech or thought. Its larger characters are not so clearly drawn. The hero, Jonathan Ely, is just a bit dim. He gets the girl almost at once-the ‘wrong one-but is never

rewarded for his vague and scrupulous amiability by getting another. Even Lydia, whom he loves and who is so impossible, is a more sympathetic, because a_ stronger, ‘character. Pierre Maillard, the sub-hero, a young French painter, also gets the girl-quite the wrong one for him, too. We expect Delia, even if she does leave her husband for Pierre, to reach some equilibrium before the end of the book, and her suicide is an unsatisfying ending. It is our uncertainty as to the novelist’s purpose which diminishes the effect of a good but not supreme novel. The world of New York society at the point where it borders the arts and the fringe of socially-acceptable refugees from Europe (whose motto, it appears, is "Eat, drink and be merry, for to-morrow we leave New York’’) is the territory of this novel. Those who have difficulty in making tactful but noncommittal remarks to an® artist on his work should read it for tips. Everye one is Wery well-bred.

David

Hall