THE BURNING GLASS

by S. N. Behrman ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 27, 1968

This is the well-known playwright and biographer's first novel (Duveen. etc.) and it's a rather old-fashioned, decorous, explicatory entertainment with a good many entreactes; and subsidiary characters which not only set the stage but fill it. If, at the center, is one Stanley Grant, a somewhat callow, shallow young playwright with a good many doubts about his identity and his identification (he is Jewish), he is not really interesting enough to attract the reader as he should and as he does a good many young women: Stephanie an actress with a drug dependency; Eileen, the plain girl from home in Xenia, Ohio, whom he is forced to marry; Sally, a thorny ""American Beauty rose""; etc. The main presence here is that of Alexander Lowe, a Galician Jew who becomes his surrogate father, dies at the close of the book in which the guttering candle in the burning glass seems brighter since Stanley now is ready to assume his religious affiliation. The scenes shifting from a pre-Hitler Vienna to Salzburg, all with raffiniert elegance, to Hollywood, without its garishness, compensate to a degree for the rather torporous stretches. All in all, middleweight entertainment for middlebrow readers--sweetened tsoras.

Pub Date: June 27, 1968

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1968

Categories: FICTION