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This novel has no one setting but deliberately
takes a cast of five characters, all of whom know
each other and whose paths cross and part through
the book, always with significant results. The settings
change from New York, to Florida, to Italy, to Texas.
The changing locales are occasioned by work at home
and abroad. The time of the book is the ’50’s and early
’60’s, when Americans felt most keenly their post-war
position in the world, the need for maintaining ‘images’
of accomplishment and success. The two couples
are Charles and Irene Waddell, a worldly pair involved
with American policy-making in Italy, and Jerry and
Catherine Sasser, she being an heiress of a wealthy
Texas oil family, and he the outsider to her town from
childhood on, but the first, real and final attachment
of her life. After the war, Jerry goes into the Washington
scene as adviser and ‘trouble-shooter’ for a Texas
senator. The fifth character, involved in turn with both
the women, and sometime friend of all (except Jerry
Sasser), is a struggling sculptor from the Mississippi
coast, Barry Day. He is often, because of his presence,
an observer on the scene of lives for whom he feels
affection though he cannot live at their level. A successful
career is a goal he can never realize.
The real interest in the novel was to me in the
spiritual states which these various persons embody.
Catherine seems the closest to a pure spirit, driven at
times almost over the edge of sanity by Jerry, who,
from his combat days onward, verges more and more
toward the shadows of infidelity, dishonor and darkness.
The Waddells are more blatantly dependent on showiness,
the vibrance and fashionable motifs of ‘interesting people,’
‘a stimulating social life,’ decor, good addresses,
possessions and high-profile success.
Barry emerges as a person far below the Waddell
ideals, but, with Catherine, the spirit of most genuine worth.
This novel has somewhat dropped out of sight. It
received a number of very fine reviews when it appeared,
and was brought out in England. I believe many thought
it was less concentrated in its impact than the novels which
develop in one setting.
Anyone wishing to explore dramatic possibilities
would do well, I think, to concentrate on the story
of Catherine and Jerry Sasser, involved, as it definitely
is, with the style and context of the Kennedy era.
This novel is currently out of print.
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