THE TREND IS UP

by Anthony West ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 30, 1960

Anthony West has written a highly detailed and intelligent modern American novel the main theme of which is a man's search for the Meaning of Life. Gavin Hatfield came from a genteel, aloof Boston family and at an early age turned his back on what presumably his family stood for and determined to devote himself to making money. Ruthlessly he acquired a million before he was thirty, bought property on the west coast of Florida and decided he should have a wife to go with it. Ilona Murray the impoverished member of a wealthy New England family married Gavin for his money though he was convinced that he was in love with her. They have three children. Over the years they drift apart and Gavin, though he has become the most prominent and public spirited citizen in Maramee, decides that he knows absolutely nothing about his life, chooses a new one, joins the Army at the start of World War II. His war experiences compounded with the domestic difficulties he meets non he returns home convince him that his greatest happiness is only in the absence of pain, of feeling. Ilona has become an alcoholic and, to make a divorce impossible, a Roman Catholic. He has become a stranger to his children. His oldest, Thomas, behaves like a shrewd Gavin in reverse, returns to Boston and tchfield; his second child, Mary, falls in love first with a homosexual, later marries a Negro; and his youngest daughter falls desperately in love with some kind of beatnik. Finally Ilona leaves him and frantically runs around the world with a homosexual crowd. At the end of all this, when the full ironic implications of the book's title become clear, Gavin concludes that his entire life has been some ""curious entanglement in a dream that wasn't even his own"". Written with absolute clarity and intelligence, there's nothing in this book which is unauthentic. It's a telling comment on upper middle class life in America. The possibilities seem remote that a search for reality can ever be meaningful amid such distortion and depressing vacuousness or that Gavin Hatfield, if by some chance he should find what he's looking for, would be equipped to deal with it.

Pub Date: Aug. 30, 1960

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1960

Categories: FICTION