The Smog of Anonymity
SNELLING, PAULA
The Smog of Anonymity One Hour. By Lillian Smith. Harcourt, Brace. 440 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by Paula Snelling Contributor to the "Saturday Review," "Progressive'' IN HER NEW novel, Lillian...
...As Malcolm Cowley said, long ago, in a review of Strange Fruit, "Her method gives the effect of a subject portrayed in all four dimensions...
...Grace, a dancer and painter who once entered a forbidden place and has never quite left it: Susan, a modern and very young witch who turns witch hunter: and her mother, Renie...
...Among the people whose lives you enter are: David Landrum...
...never such rewards attached to being "neutral" when a choice should be made between right and wrong, or such temptation to go along with board or community in a decision you would not have made alone...
...mark of all Miss Smith's writings...
...It is her awareness of the eternal oneness of the tenses, her ability to envision and convey the fusion of the finite with the infinite that is a distinguishing...
...But One Hour is more than a good tale: It is a story–in–depth in which fable and dream form an organic whole with headline story and revelation of character...
...It is Miss Smith's awareness of the wholeness over and beyond the ambiguities and conflicts, and her large talent for its expression, which makes this book a memorable one...
...and those mutual betrayals which existential man...
...The resonance of her imagination, the resolution of interior movements and patterns, and her clean, flexible prose combine to create a simple, unified and powerful story...
...his wife...
...One Hour indicates the seductive ease with which one can become a faceless man today and the smog of anonymity now penetrating every level of society...
...The better writers today are those who do not let us forget that there are aspects of man beyond reason and surface reality which cannot be denied: his irrational urges, his illusions, his childhood, his myths, his participation in collective dreams and collective nightmares...
...The people in the novel are as real and complex as the ones across the breakfast table or in your mirror...
...who possesses as charming a surface as you are likely to come across, and as chaotic an interior...
...Lillian Smith is concerned with these aspects of man and she seeks their reconciliation and unity within a wholeness that is greater than the sum of its parts...
...Among them are the seduction of belief by suspicion, of individual by organization, of right by expediency...
...What she does is more than painting or even sculpture: It is as if three–dimensional people were moving past you on the current of time...
...One important theme of the book is seduction: the alleged seduction of Susan by Mark, and the many less definable, more insidious seductions that take place through the book—and throughout our culture...
...with no Ariadne's thread to guide him, must make when faced with antipodal pulls coming from the rational and the irrational parts of his being...
...There is still stronger evidence in this new" novel that the author is at home with time, for, with skill and prescience, she passes through some of those arbitrary demarcations Western man so brashly set up when, drunk with the discovery of past–present–future, he shunted into oblivion those clockless places within us where memory and dream reside...
...Reviewed by Paula Snelling Contributor to the "Saturday Review," "Progressive'' IN HER NEW novel, Lillian Smith explores the dark complexities of the modern experience, and fuses them into a fascinating and exciting book...
...Because of the charged subject matter Lillian Smith always deals with, it seems to be difficult for some critics to direct attention to her way of writing...
...I think her treatment of time is worth serious consideration...
...Never have there been such strong invisible strings to pull, if you have power and feel that power threatened...
...Mark Channing, research scientist, chosen by a small child as the chief character in her fantasy life...
...But it is only half the truth to say that each of them is uniquely himself: the remainder of the truth is that they are also indicative of the failures– and triumphs, the aspirations and betrayals, the loneliness and the oneness, of every man of our time...
...Episcopal priest, the disarmingly honest narrator of these events...
...On one level, One Hour is a spine– chilling piece of story–telling...
Vol. 42 • October 1959 • No. 38
