The Lost Chord

...The Beat of Life is finally not so much an insight into "beat" as a symptom of beat, and if the book is depressing it is not only because the characters can't come alive to themselves, but also because the author herself—who is young and talented and who might be daring—retreats behind shallow and simplistic limitations which engender explanation rather than exploration...

...The clutch doesn't take, the child must be aborted, and the exhausted love paid for by suicide and sexual parody...

...Solomon tries a little too self-consciously to "speak for the new generation...

...The author alternates her first-person narrative between boy and girl, handling a difficult job with great restraint and making her people seem real and touching...

...There is hardly a word which doesn't belong or which isn't put to use to bind the book into a whole...

...The result is that whereas Hemingway had to explore the meanings of various human experiences, Mrs...

...Solomon's people, on the other hand, just want to be left alone—or alone together...

...creating something worth living for is out of the question...

...As the deserted young man makes his novice obeisance to the Academy—a self-incarceration in the perpetual schoolhouse—he utters a final line, the finest: "Now if I am lucky, I may pass for a boy until I am forty...

...Doing a perfect inside job is not enough...

...And yet it is not a very interesting piece of writing...

...He knew that the unique thing about his people was not their lostness, but how they struggled with it, what ways out they sought...

...Hemingway, among others, told us about the "Lost Generation" and did it much more memorably...

...The impasse of symbiotic love is as unsatisfying to read about as it is to live...

...Don't think I miss the point...

...It is the most reckless and extreme plunge into the struggle that commands the novel, and to follow this plunge commands from the novelist the most relentless strain of his imagination...

...To do this she documents, as in a case history, the national, ethnic and intellectual backgrounds of her hero and heroine...

...the novelist must bridge the gap between hero and world with fiction and not sociology...

...He hates jazz...

...This is the well-made novel, honest, unpretentious and genuinely disturbing...

...Just keeping the single soul alive takes enormous effort...

...The point is that young people are not active these days, like it or not: they suck inward and kill off the life in one another...

...The girl comes home for the summer from Bennington wanting only to be loved...

...One might apologize that this is the truth of the author's generation, and if the novelist is to tell the truth she must suffer whatever inherent drabness prevents this truth from making good fiction...

...Reviewed by Jeremy Larner Contributor, "Dissent," "Partisan Review" THE BOY IS a Columbia senior with a Village intellectual mother and no father...

...Yet the average life is no more drab or desperate now, in its own way, than it ever was...

...The novelist knows what she is talking about: She has seized upon the most pathetic want in those young people who are bright enough and demanding enough and somehow decent enough to resist being swept up in the surface energy of the advertising society—a want of vitality...

...he is nostalgic for the days when ideology was meant literally and sentimentality could be believed in...

...And very gently, with a beautiful tenderness, Barbara Probst Solomon goes inside them and makes them talk about themselves, a pair of young people alone in New York, lost in life, their search for identity narrowing to the last desperate clutch of love...

...Better to risk endless imperfections in writing or in life than to write so purely as Mrs...

...In their efforts to make contact with the world Hemingway's people fight with all their resources...

...Solomon or to live so purely as her characters...

...Solomon is occupied with explaining why her people have no experience...

...The lovers cannot come alive enough to make their love go...

...He mourns the Spanish Revolution he can never fight and the songs of the '30s which can never belong to him...

...And to do this he must create a sense of alternatives...

...People are still as they were, struggling to find meaning in life and not quite making it...

...Perhaps Mrs...

...She ought to know that dullness and desperation are not new in American literature...