Landscape of Defeat
COWLEY, JOSEPH
Landscape of Defeat In This World. By Eugene Ziller. Braziller. 256 pp. $3.75. Reviewed by Joseph Cowley Editor, Research Institute of America IF, AS PUBLISHERS claim, books of short stories...
...In "Sparrows," for example, a 56-year-old man dying of cancer thinks about his relations with his wife and brothers-in-law, and reflects on the disparity in the rewards good and evil engender...
...One reason is the author's style: flat, prosaic, stripped bare of all but the essentials...
...The author demonstrates an ability to handle a variety of subject matter, probing character, incident and thought, with an evenness of tenor remarkable in a maiden effort...
...In "The Season's Dying," a salesman picks up a 16-year-old hitchhiker in a lonely diner on the plains of Utah...
...in the rest, the "hero" succumbs to the more practical exigencies of life...
...In a world where the sheep are devoured by the wolves, the author's sympathies and sense of identification are clearly with the sheep, but there is a slight feeling of sour grapes...
...This conflict between principle and the shady compromises of life is the recurrent theme of the book...
...An excellent story, it is notable for its characterization of the principals, including a counterman, each of whom reflects a different attitude to good and evil...
...Reviewed by Joseph Cowley Editor, Research Institute of America IF, AS PUBLISHERS claim, books of short stories lose money, this book is not likely to prove an exception, especially since Ziller is a new writer and this is his first book...
...However, these may be minor flaws in a collection that otherwise does an outstanding job of creating a telling landscape of defeat...
...Why, then, the reservations about the book's impact...
...Repeatedly Ziller demonstrates his concern with the problem of good and evil...
...In almost half the stories the resolution is a killing or the promise of a killing...
...Yet this is a collection of 11 very good short stories that deserves a wider reading than it is likely to get...
...Though more than a "slice of life," the majority deal essentially with the eruption of conflict between two characters, and the outcome is typically negation...
...Unfortunately, the author's ethical concern is marred somewhat by the strong thread of self-pity and envy, especially of in-laws, which runs through so many of the stories...
...But even more than style, perhaps the fact that the stories all seem to be written in a minor key is to their detriment...
Vol. 43 • September 1960 • No. 37
