Photograph of a Youth

WALK LIKE A MORTAL--Don Wickenden--Morrow ($2.50).

Walk Like a Mortal is the story of ten quietly crucial months, some year in the '20s, in the life of 17-year-old Gabe Mackenzie. It gains no little through a fact sparsely precedented in U. S. fictional adolescence : that its hero is neither a Harold Teen, a neuraesthete, nor a tragicomic boob, but merely an intelligent, quite normal high school student.

At the start, solid citizen though he is, Gabe is more seriously captured in his mother's love than he realizes. At the finish, with his graduation from high school, he has come soundly through to the edge of independent maturity. In between, he has had a lot to please him, plenty to trouble and toughen him.

Most notably, he has seen the break-up of his parents' stale marriage, complete with quarrels, cruelties, grandmotherly interference, his own tortured and split allegiance. He has seen his mother walk out with a hollow, sad character named Charlie Cobden. He and his father have left their dead apartment to live with Uncle Henry and a menagerie of individualistic cousins, and there Gabe has had his first taste of vigorous family living. He has seen his father, who had been a kindly, negligible ghost, take on resonance and certainty. He has seen his hard mother break down and abjectly beg him to come away with her; and he has painfully made his choice. Meanwhile, too, he has carried on his active life in school, has been out on an excellently told double date, and has broken the spell of sacred fear under which frigid Louise Carpenter had held him.

Twenty-seven-year-old Dan Wickenden tells this story with the calm abundance, accomplishment and promise of one kind of natural-born writer. He tells it so well that his work bids for serious as well as genial examination.

By genial assessment there is plenty to be pleased over. His young people are among the most authentic in U. S. writing; his middle class families are hardly less good. He is an apt recorder of U. S. dwellings, furnishings, streets, and qualities of weather. He has a warm skill for drawing--sometimes overdrawing--characters. Much that he writes of is massively representative of U. S. life; he manages to give it charm without falsehood; and he makes it seem virtually his own discovery.

At its best, though, good literature must approach absolute perception, fused with absolute statement. Walk Like a Mortal, engaging though it is, cannot and wisely does not try to lay claim to either. Its perceptions are safe and uncritical. It is nicely written: yet it would be hard to find a definitive sentence in it. In appraisal of talented Dan Wickenden it is instructive to recall another book by and about another young man; James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (see p. 86). Joyce could never have written Walk Like a Mortal: even as a young man, he understood too much to set it down easily.

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