The Dark Wood

WE FOLLOW two men and two women through the intricacies of contemplated divorce and marriage in this novel of love in post-war America. Mark Bycroft, a weary veteran whose modest ambition is to get out of the Army as soon as possible and settle in the country with his wile Regan and their child, returns home to find he lias lost both his wife and his Connecticut farm. Regan, to whom the war has been worth while, since it brought her a lover, has attached herself to Bill Sytncs. a bounderish hut charming fellow who knows “important” people and advises the State Department on unmentioned matters. Into Mark’s dark forest of disillusion and indecision comes Stella Hannon, a war widow alternately trying to bury and to recall the past, dead to life at thirty.

Enmeshed m the tangle of these four lives are Miriam Sparrow and her husband Dick, whose loyalties are severely strained by the tact that he is Regan’s divorce lawyer as well as Stella’s close friend; Oclavia. the Bycrofts* maid, who possesses the qualities of compassionate understanding which her mistress so totally laeks; and Neddy, a wordless child of six, who apparently knows all but reveals nothing.

Miss Weston’s people drift in and out of crisis with emotional reactions so faint or undeveloped that it is hard to care which roads the four wanderers will choose or with whom they will travel. We have little incentive to tollow them. We are asked to understand, for instance, that the turning point in Stella’s life occurs w hen she sees a man sitting in a restaurant who reminds her of Alec, her dead husband. On the strength of this chance physical resemblance she teels herself “transfigured” and follows him about town ill a trance for weeks iiefore they meet.

As is frequently llie case, the author has found vice easier to portray than virtue. Regan and Semes are recognizable, if exaggerated, types of ambitious, predatory men and women, while their more benign counterparts remain flat and wavering shadows.

MARY PINCHOT