Books: Transgressor's Collapse

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THE STORY OF A LAKE—Negley Farson —Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

The career of Negley Parson—athlete, munitions salesman, aviator, foreign correspondent, lover—has been, if nothing else, a testament to his superb physique. As readers galloped through his best-selling autobiography, The Way of a Transgressor, their wonder grew how a man could avoid cracking up even halfway through such adventures.

Last fortnight Negley Farson did at last crack up—but only fictitiously, in a semi-autobiographical novel about a famous U. S. newspaperman who ends up drinking himself to death in a backwoods cabin in British Columbia. An awkwardly constructed, Lost Generation novel, teeming with love affairs, ineffective cures for alcoholism, neurotic athleticism, it will be read for its confessional thrills. But it will arouse little sympathy, despite the alibi that its drunken hero is an idealist "still searching for the impossible in love, still clinging to many of his childhood ecstasies and still uncalloused. . . ."

Negley Farson was born too late. In the heydey of Harold Bell Wright he could not have failed, with that hero and those backwoods, to write an inspirational novel which would have sold a million.