Maturity From Rebellion:

...His first novel, The End of My Life, was one of the earliest war novels to appear and, though it had but little success compared to some others, remains one of the best...

...But in this case we believe that maturity really is on the way, and not just because the hero tells us so, for Bourjaily writes with the maturity his hero is hoping to achieve and with a balance and judgment, both literary and personal, that make this novel a pleasure to read...

...The sentient young man eager for life who seeks to find it through drinking, whoring and fighting is a stereotype in American fiction...

...Reviewed by Victor Chapin Author, "The Hill," "The Lotus Seat," "The Company of Players" The writers of the war generation, those now 40 or more, have, with a few brilliant but unstable exceptions, taken a long time to mature...

...I do not know if Bourjaily has invented his protagonist Quince or is merely writing about himself...

...Secondly, and more important, Bourjaily has done what any number of writers working the same vein have failed to do: He convinces us that out of the wild rebellion, the abandon, the horror and despair, came the kind of maturity devoutly to be wished for all the heroes of all the novels such as this...

...This account of a young man's experiences with sex, drink, dope, jazz and friendship in the years just before, during, and just after the war would be as tiresome as so many of them are were it not for the fact that, first of all, Bourjaily is a superior writer with a style of his own and, in this book, a method, borrowed from the tradition of the 18th century, that gives both variety and organization to his material...

...The question readers will consider is not whether this book is shocking and unnecessarily graphic, but whether it is truly ruthless and, therefore, really honest...

...He has, however, been slow to consolidate his position in the literary world...

...A good deal of the material found in that novel has been reworked by Bourjaily and incorporated by him into a new and larger-scaled work, Confessions of a Spent Youth...

...For one, their experience was more than usually difficult to absorb, involving as it did not only the war itself, but the long and desperate cycle from rebellion through reaction to some sort of reconciliation...

...Others will probably say that it is just another realistic novel with little more to it than the often sordid realities it portrays...

...No doubt, the reasons are obvious...

...Indeed, I am tempted to think that Bourjaily set himself to write an up-to-date Tom Jones or Humphrey Clinker...

...By now the constant reader is used to frankness from writers, particularly where sex is concerned, but frankness and honesty are not the same thing...

...Bourjaily ends his novel just as the maturity is setting in, which is where a good many novels have ended...

...Bourjaily announces to his readers that he means to be ruthlessly honest in these "confessions" and that he thinks something is to be gained from it...

...Whatever interest is to be found in him comes not through what he does but through what he gets out of it...

...No honest reader, however, could fail to admit that, whatever he thinks of its content, this is a superbly written novel superbly put together...

...For me, Bourjaily has done what he said he would do, and the result is a novel that, if he had failed to be honest, would have been distasteful and probably tedious but which is, instead, real, moving, and in many respects delightful...

...This novel, I think, will have a considerable success, though some people will be shocked by it and will question the author's motives for writing it...

...In the last few years it has become evident that there is a respectable number of first-class writers of this generation who have what it takes to stay the course...

...Of these, Vance Bourjaily was one of the first to be called most likely to succeed...

...We are familiar with the recurrent American writer incurably sentimental about his own virility and eternally nostalgic for the fine rebellious behavior of his youth...

...And he has succeeded admirably...

...It hardly matters, for either wayQuince is a modern hero who can be taken seriously and who can, as the hero of any good novel should, teach us a great deal about the experience of a generation...