Not Truth But Comfort

...It would at once oversimplify the book and make it seem confused to describe the ensuing complications, in which emotions that previously might have lived in limbo find a home in the tragedy of a child's disappearance, furnishing it unwittingly with their own oddments...

...Beyond the suspicions that are directed against the child's unloving father and equally unloving stepmother, the guilt of others—though some barely knew Vivian—becomes illuminated, as if her disappearance had turned on a light in their inner dusky worlds...

...Christine Gray, especially, who is 17 when the novel opens, having escorted Vivian home the final day the child was seen, experiences ever after the torments of uncertainty—intensified by the knowledge that she had not really liked her though she had behaved kindly...

...Though she vanishes early in the book, Vivian is the bond uniting a varied group...

...The last line of this novel—when Christine has finally come to peace—may be the key of its meaning: ". . . she had never wanted the truth, but only comfort, so she had not now found it...

...Despite wishing that Miss Paul had avoided framing her fine book in "mystery" and "suspense," I am grateful to have read a novel that glows...

...The Twice Lost child is not only the one gone from the village, but the child who lives on in the adult, lost in the twilight of self until reality is challenged by a crisis, and fantasy once more becomes an alluring footpath...

...But Miss Paul's gift is individual and original...

...Reviewed by Henrietta Weigel Contributor, "American Mercury," "Kenyon Review," "New Voices" THROUGH THE disappearance of a small girl from the English village of Hilbery, Twice Lost imaginatively explores those who had known the child well or casually, or only through hearsay...

...If Henry James' The Turn of the Screw comes to mind, it is because Phyllis Paul's characters, too, are symbols of moral forces (for this reader, more human, however, than James' characters...

...Keith, the son a famous writer, Under the guise of devotion not only to his dead father but to the public his father had served, convinces himself, if not others, that his father had murdered the child...

...This book has the magic out of which the best writing is spun—never saddening, no matter how unhappy are the lives we share with the printed page, somehow freeing us, too, as it frees their remote realms...