PREPARED FOR RAGE

Better than the average novel in autobiographical vein- of youth recaptured- but at that, it has numerous competitors, and nothing strikingly original, except perhaps its restraint. Before the war, Mark Saxton had three semi-intellectualized novels of intrigue on Farrar & Rinehart's list. Now, looking backward to a youth not far away, he tells- in the third perso- a story of a boy growing up, Jerry. He recaptures impressions- at random of childhood in a happy home, fairly prosperous, intellectual background; he glimpses briefly- and rather superficially- a Catholic school, but with no sense of religious bondage; he gives more space to years at Harvard, normal, healthy contacts, spiritual and intellectual adventures, bull sessions, occasional fringes of flaming youth, girls, liberalism and so on. There's a basically sound core to this picture of the best of young America; but it is almost too right, too normal to make it very enticing from the sales angle. The two girls in his life- importantly so- are Denny, who takes without giving, and Avian, whose passage in and out and in again, from childhood on, results in a happy marriage. Jerry you'll like -- and believe in implicitly.