DWELL IN THE WILDERNESS

A novel of the effect a survival of Victorian prudery has on a supposedly modern group of young people. Inherited traditions, inherited prejudices, inherited inhibitions, what a trail of inadequacy and frustration and abnormality they drew. The story of a mid-western family, of a father gradually succumbing to the pressure of circumstances and the domination of a wife whose every instinct seemed warped, and of the sons and daughter, and their futile gestures of escape. There is a faint shadow of something awry that comes to the fore toward the close in the revelation of perversion -- possibly a necessary instrument, from the author's viewpoint, to achieve his denouement, but -- to the reader, it seems dragged in with unnecessary shift of focus, involving a distortion of the picture in backward glance. This element will limit your market, as the conservatives will avoid it. Well-done and distinctly above average.