Cozzens Against the Grain

MORNING NOON AND NIGHT by James Gould Cozzens. 408 pages. Har-courf, Brace & World. $5.95.

The best novels of James Gould Coz zens (Guard of Honor, The Just and the Unjust) are like carefully preserved late-model Packards: grand and stately vehicles that are neither quite contemporary nor completely anachronistic. But always they are models of impeccable workmanship. In them Cozzens' highly polished prose style gleams like a Simonize job; his subtly conceived characterizations are spun like fine grillwork; and his intricately devised plots are so delicately tuned that they can hum and purr when idling.

So it comes as a shock that Coz zens, in his first novel since By Love Possessed (TIME cover, Sept. 2, 1957), has attempted to write a severe anti-novel. Not surprisingly, the result is less than successful. Henry Worthington is like most Cozzens heroes. Society judges him a winner, but on the basis of his own secretly harbored prima facie evidence he wonders if he just might not be a loser after all. A successful management consultant of "sixty odd," Worthington decides with metaphorical directness to examine the management --and meaning--of his own life. His method, however, is indirect and discursive, dicey and erratic.

A writer manque serving as his own narrator, he deliberately imposes no literary controls on history ("I offer little more than a disordered compilation of rough notes"); his unconscious is his only guide. Hence, even before Worthington gets to recall key cameos of himself--as a boy who once foolishly stole, as a young man who was once seduced by an older woman--there are overlong, superficial ruminations and cop-out digressions on the mechanics and nature of memory itself. Finally, in due meandering course, Worthington remembers a first wife who two-timed him and a second wife who two-timed life by committing suicide. But mostly he prefers to muse about aristocratic ancestors or recall some of his own flighty experiences as an Air Force officer in wartime Washington.

Everything is presented in fits and starts, sputters without sparks, unreeling like a Krapp's last tape of random memories. Themes are developed capriciously, then dropped completely like essay answers in a sophomore's exam book. Nor is there a single plot line snaking toward a large revelation. Worthington, for example, is obviously by death obsessed, but he is far too thin-blooded ever to go gently raging toward that good twilight.

Cozzens, to give him the benefit of any doubt, may have wanted Worthington's distended and directionless nar rative style to serve as a form of complex characterization and ironic statement: it is Worthington's recurring point that life is drift as much as design. In a wry put-on, Cozzens may have intended'to mock that notion. But if that is the case, the novel still fails, because Cozzens has chosen to write against the grain of his own special talent--that of a meticulous and compulsive craftsman--which demands the imposition of a precise design. The anti-novel requires bright irreverence, an almost exuberant sense of the absurd. It is just not--and it is easy to imagine Cozzens wincing at the phrase--his bag.

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