Books: Death of the Optimist

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Even Match. Beset by a whole choreography of fears ("Every man his own Laocoon"), hardly able to leave his room. Wilderness half holds himself together by one purpose. The final objective of his Mexican pilgrimage is to see an old friend named Juan Fernando Martinez, fellow drinker and philosopher, who mirrors like some doomed twin the life-death forces at war in Wilderness. The ending is both pat and heartfelt. When Wilderness discovers that Juan Fernando had died six years before, he is redeemed into a kind of rebirth, and the novel fades on wheat fields ripening.

"I wouldn't have thought that your daemon specialized in happy endings," Wilderness' wife Primrose remarks. Yet that is exactly what Lowry has written, with desperate passion, despite the fact that he considered it "rather a second-rate ambition to be an optimist." Lowry could no more round off his hope than his book. But at a time when the fashion for the novel is basic black—when despair has gone slick—Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid once again gives the struggle between good and evil the dignity of an even match, and the excitement of a metaphysical cliffhanger.