Mud on the Stars

By William Bradford Huie

IF YOU can stand another rough-and-tough novel of the goddam-guts-bitch school of writing, in which the author tells all about everything, you will find this one very instructive — and the older you are the more you will learn from it. Its obvious faults are as revealing as its excellences. The dedication gives its theme and purpose: “To the Roosevelt generation of Americans; to the modern children of confusion; to the fellows who, at the end of an era of cynicism, were forced to die for the proposition that men are noble creatures.” The TVA, WPA, Jews, Catholics, “Southern gentlemen,” damyankees, Fascists, the University of Alabama, Hugo Black, Aimee McPherson, communists, strikes, lynchings, the New Deal — the young hero knows them all, has ideas about them all, puts them all down. As a record of one kind of youth in a bad time, it is practically encyclopedic; as an account of a groping for firm footing amid quicksands, it is both saddening and heartening. R. M. G.