Dr. Bull
THE LAST ADAM--James Gould Cozzens --Ear court, Brace ($2.50).
Though Author James Gould Cozzens is not yet 30 he has already hung up a U. S. literary record: his last two novels have been Book-of-the-Month Club choices. A little over a year ago it was S. S. San Pedro; this week it is The Last Adam. Not many readers would yet think, of Cozzens in terms of the late great Joseph Conrad, but even fewer will quarrel with the Book-of-the-Month Club's choice. Author Cozzens has a Kiplingesque flair for dramatizing hard facts, a shrewd zest in making a plain tale move and glitter.
Scene of The Last Adam is New Winton, a Connecticut village complete with selectmen, gossips, bootlegger, post-office politicians, curmudgeons, lady of the manor, puritans, pagans. Author Cozzens introduces the strands of New Winton's life through the neat modern medium of the local telephone exchange, where the operators are so well known they are always called by name, act as a matter of course as the village news bureau. In New Winton's collection of characters the town sawbones, Dr. Bull, stands out like a large masculine thumb. Even without his initial incentive of being a parson's son Dr. Bull's appetites are scandalously hearty. An increasing faction in New Winton, led by First Lady Mrs. Banning and puritanical Matthew Herring, find them an abomination, mutter also at the slapdash way Doc Bull treats his patients, public opinion, his Board of Health job. The doctor, an active, level-headed but choleric 60-year-old, has no very exalted view of medicine, speaks his candid mind on all occasions. ''An old horse doctor like me looks at them and all he can see is that medical science is perfectly useless in 95 out of every 100 cases." Though he has great contempt for most of his neighbors, Doc Bull has found a kindred spirit in Janet Cardmaker, unconventional spinster who is far from being an old maid. She and Doc Bull are suspect, thought to be in league, but neither of them cares a whoop.
When a mysterious epidemic breaks out in town Doc Bull is annoyed because it interferes with more interesting pursuits, such as his annual rattlesnake hunt. His old aunt tells him flatly it is typhoid fever: she knows it by the smell. Sure enough, she is right. And then, though the Doctor works like a bull to get the epidemic under control, his enemies go to work to put the blame on him. As Board of Health terrier he should have smelled out the rat that polluted the town's water supply. The "better element." cumulatively exasperated by Doc Bull's plain speaking and low living, rally to get his scalp. With conscious irony Author Cozzens lets the town villain, smart Henry Harris, save Dr. Bull's hair by turning the laugh on his enemies, persuading the town that the Doctor is not such a bad old fellow after all.
The Author, Chicago-born of New England stock, does not regard his province as a Coolidge Holy Land. His report of it is as factual as a newspaper, as much more interesting as the truth-between-the-lines. Says he: 'I will confess that I think of myself as being entirely New England and having an almost proprietary knowledge of it. You know the kind of thing I mean--a struggle with myself not to be a little bit Olympian when other people talk about it." His New Winton may be Kent, Conn, (where he went to school for six years) but he has left Kent School out of his picture. Nor has he recognizably drawn 'one of Kent's saltiest characters--as individual, in his way, as Cozzens' Dr. Bull--Kent School's famed headmaster, Father Frederick Sill. Tall, thin, startled-looking, with thick black eyebrows and black hair. Author Cozzens could pass as much younger than his 29 years. No novice at his trade, he has free lanced since his undergraduate days at Kent. The Last Adam is his sixth book. Others: Confusion, Michael Scarlett, Cockpit, Son of Perdition.
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