DANGLING MAN

Diary of an interlude — as Joseph, undergoing the whimsies of his draft board, spends several months of contemplative inactivity while waiting for his letter from the President. This is a self portrait of a disgruntled intellectual, or aspirant to intellectualism, a former Communist sympathizer, as he broods in his room, increasingly on the defensive, increasingly critical of his old friends, his wife, his stuffed shirt brother. He quarrels mentally and morally with the issue of going to war; he accepts with a certain relief his induction notice which relieves him of independent thought. An unsympathetic figure as portrayed; not very satisfying reading.