Modern Marriage

At 19, when he wrote The Loom of Youth, Alec Waugh was hailed as a promising young writer. All through his 20s he heard the cry repeated. When his younger, sprightlier brother Evelyn (Vile Bodies, Decline and Fall) achieved immediate and continued success, reviewers had not tired of telling readers to watch Alec. Last week, with his thirty-first book, Going Their Own Ways (Farrar & Rinehart $2.50), 40-year-old Alec Waugh was i promising writer still. But it had long been obvious that he would never be as good as his model, John Galsworthy.

Going Their Own Ways is subtitled A Novel of Modern Marriage. Typical examples :

John Fane, a sleepy, upper-middle-class London publisher, father of four grown children; and Mary Fane, who putters around their country home planning parish fetes and dinners for twelve. At 53 John finds he has money, leisure, no fun. Soon he has a town apartment, a mistress, no wife.

Muriel Fane, dull, constantly depressed daughter of John; and Henry Morton, a dreary hop-farmer. Hops slump, she has children; between them they are so comfortably, wholeheartedly gloomy that the marriage survives.

Galsworthian technique--thorough rubber-necking at upper-middle-class lives --is at best photographic, kaleidoscopic; at worst trite, futile, obvious. One of Alec Waugh's characters testifies against the author on page 263 (not yet the end): "Her marriage had become like a novel on whose two hundredth page the reader, foreseeing the climax, can only remain inquisitive as to the actual means by which the ultimate unravelling is to be achieved."

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