Mountain Time

THE town of Custis, Rocky Mountains, U.S.A., saw, back in 1920, the return of two of its natives. Josephine Caneday, who had left Custis to sing at the Metropolitan Opera, had married instead into a world of phony artists, glib seekers after truth and the good life, and she had earned twenty-five dollars a Sunday singing at the Schurz Street Presbyterian Church. Cy Kinsman, after Harvard Medical School and the Army, had been surgical resident in New York’s Mercy Hospital, where he discovered that he possessed not only an exceptional pair of hands but an exceptional ability to antagonize all his colleagues.

Jo began to smell mountain breezes from the crowded sidewalks of Twenty-third Street when the good life turned out to be not so good. Cy headed west, not as to an enchanted land, but to the beginnings a man must seek out when life presents him with a blank wall. Their return to Custis was not in glory. Jo came back a failure in her career, her marriage, her whole emotional adjustment to life; Cy came back with an abundance of integrity but he could not satisfactorily explain to the townspeople, to Josephine Caneday, or to himself why he suddenly had to turn his back on medicine, why the superb hands must be denied their function.

In Custis, while Cy pulls Jo slowly and painfully out of nervous collapse, while he works his own difficult way toward enlightenment, their own relationship with each other follows the tortured, violent pattern of their individual fears and inhibitions. Jo, back in the small town, surrounded by family and mountains and Cy’s secure — if antagonizing — presence, returns to health; Cy, back on native ground where he had been born and brought up as old Doc Kinsman’s boy, comes to self-knowledge — is, as he says, reborn. The final pages of the novel are a beginning as much as they are an end.

Mr. DeVoto tells his story with exactness and precision; behind the observation, there is always the keen mind. With Jo, perhaps, he is too precise; he has pared her down so that she sometimes seems more case study than woman, and his clinical treatment of her is apt to obscure the fact that Cy’s search for his soul, and his struggle to come to terms with himself, are something quite different from her neurosis. But Cy, as Mr. DeVoto conceives him, is impressive.

RICHARD SCOWCROFT