Books: Not without Blood

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Jack Burden did a thoroughly successful job on Judge Irwin but he did not explode the charge until Stark's son, Tom, got a girl into trouble and political enemies started to use this against Willie. When the charge did go off, it uncovered some strange relationships (and some unnecessary melodrama). Jack's mother and his friends, Adam and Anne Stanton, and a lot of others are drawn into the vortex of events that is the swift and punishing, tragic and surprising last half of this book. It is climaxed by the inevitable assassination of Willie Stark in a corridor of the Capitol.

Robert Penn Warren, 41, onetime Rhodes Scholar and managing editor of the defunct Southern Review, has written two other novels, neither so good as this, and some first-rate poetry. In all his writing, even at its slickest—and some of this novel is pretty slick—there is a sense of doom and blood on the moon that Warren has gradually shifted into religious terms. Though the title of this book comes from a nursery rhyme, its epigraph comes from a passage in Dante's Purgatorio: "By curse of theirs man is not so lost, that eternal love may not return, so long as hope retaineth aught of green."