LET ME BE AWAKE

Between his seventeenth and eighteenth years, Vince Reed graduated from high school, fell in love twice, entered college, discovered the pleasures of literature and the excitement of New York City, decided to become an actor, studied voice, learned of human cruelty, found that his parents were far from perfect and that people are not what they seem to be. These steps along the path to maturity take place in an Indiana university town, a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, with its house parties and fraternity row, Brooklyn, Greenwich Village, New York's East Side. The characters are equally varied--unsophisticated girls and psychoneurotic girls, college bullies and Oscar Wilde-ish young men, an ungrammatical 4th Avenue bookseller who knew the great names of the 20's, a sadistic college professor, a beer-drinking voice teacher of Wagnerian proportions. The theme of a young man finding himself is hardly new--but this book is fresh and novel because it deals with today's young generation in a manner neither beat nor Salinger nor sentimental. It displays insight and humor (broad perhaps, but still funny as in the reading-poetry-to-jazz scene) seriousness and no condescension in its picture of youth. A promising if not profound novel.