Monday, Jan. 31, 1949
Course Without Compass
THE HOLLOW OF THE WAVE (318 pp.) --Edward Newhouse--Sloane ($3.50).
In the depression '30s, Hungary-born Edward Newhouse wrote a leftish novel, You Can't Sleep Here, that led one critic to hail him as "the proletarian Hemingway." Two years later, his story of a Communist organizer (This Is Your Day) further established his skill--and his slant. He had been a contributor to the New Masses, but while his left hand was busy with ideological chores, his right was making a reputation for him with short stories in The New Yorker.
In his new novel, The Hollow of the Wave, Author Newhouse, 36, has jumped the party line, but he seems to have lost his novelist's direction in the process. Neil Miller, his hero and narrator, is a cynical ex-hobo (Newhouse rode the rods in his day, too) who works in a New York publishing house; his aim is to save $1,000 and escape from it all on a tramp steamer. Larry, the publisher, is a serious, decent, do-gooding young millionaire who wants to put out good books but is completely dominated by his Communist staff.
Nearly all the major characters are frustrated neurotics, neither certain of their aims in life nor at home in life: the men are unable to hold their wives, the women to remain faithful to their husbands. When the war puts Neil and Larry in uniform, they find something to believe in for the first time. Afterwards Neil stays in the Army out of cynicism and lack of direction, and Larry, his publishing house completely taken over by Communists, joins him in simple despair. The book ends on Larry's bewildered question: "What are we doing here, you and I?"
Long before the end, readers may ask themselves the same question. The Hollow of the Wave fails to explain the social dilemma of its drifting characters and falls equally short of lighting up the sources of their individual despair. Even the Communists' victory over a bewildered liberal seems of no more interest to Author Newhouse than it does to his hero, who acts as if he expected defeat all along and manages to shrug it off. Having dived from his old Marxist crest, Novelist Newhouse himself seems still to be washing about in the hollow of the wave.
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