Monday, Feb. 19, 1951

There I Go

STRAIT AND NARROW (384 pp.)--Geoffrey Cotterell--Lippincott ($3.50).

Even in England, the enthusiasm for Jocelyn Brooke and his metaphysical puzzlers (See above) is pretty much restricted to the critics and the advance guard. The ordinary armchair Englishman is far more likely to prefer Geoffrey Cotterell. There are no great puzzles in Cotterell. A 31-year-old middle-class Englishman, Cotterell writes about other middle-class Englishmen in a manner designed to let the whole breed murmur to themselves: There but for the grace of God go I.

Cotterell's fourth novel (and first to be published in the U.S.) is a British Book Society choice, has sold 40,000 copies since publication. Strait and Narrow is simply the story of a self-made man, Richard Tarrant, and what Tarrant learns about himself.

Tarrant is one of those men whose ambition jells before his character sets. Early in life he decides that middle-class gentility and slightly frayed cuffs are not enough for him. There is nothing melodramatic or Freudian about Tarrant vis-`a-vis parents. His father is a good surveyor; his mother, an enlightened type, believes in not spanking children and in the BBC's Third Program. Tarrant vows that he would "rather starve than live as they had lived."

A second-rate public school focuses his aim; he picks the career of law because it is often so well paid. Social-climbing nimbly, he marries money, does a stint with the R.A.F. largely because some day "it might be very useful" to have a war record. After the war he is ready for his next big push: a seat in Parliament. Just shy of his goal, his wife discovers him renewing a wartime love affair. Hopelessly attached to her husband, Nancy Tarrant commits suicide.

Her death brings him to a stop. Not much of a philosopher, he winds up with a set of reflections that are at least his own: "Everyone came lonely into the world and went lonely out of it, but he was to be lonely in between. Well, it was his own fault." He had run with his eyes shut to a self-made purgatory.

Intended, in part, as a parable on the vanity of human wishes, Cotterell's anatomy of melancholy goes only onionskin-deep. His American publishers hail him as the British John P. Marquand. It's too early for that comparison, but Cotterell is working the same kind of street and keeping a lot of Englishmen reading.

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