Damnation

THE LOST WEEKEND - Charles Jackson -Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

Webster was much possessed by death And saw the skull beneath the skin. . . .

- T. S. Eliot.

American novelists of the 20th Century have been much possessed by damnation.

Though Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck et al. never use the old-fashioned language of theology, the world they describe is a world where the people are predestined to the damnation of death, defeat, madness or senility. In The Lost Weekend, an unevenly brilliant first novel, the sense of damnation is strong. But even stronger is the sense of suspense -will he escape? why can't he escape? why doesn't the damn fool answer that telephone?0 -which is the quality that makes the hopeless tale into a horror story, luring the reader on and on to the inconclusive but hopeless end.

In a sense, every novel creates a little world of its own. In that sense The Lost Weekend is a world inhabited by only one soul, and that one damned. The story tells of five days in the life of Don Birnam, a clever coward who is drinking himself to death.

Although there are other characters --his brother, who supports him, lives with him (in Manhattan) and tries un successfully to keep him away from liquor and out of trouble ; a girl who is in love with him and does her equally un complaining nurse's part; various people from whom he "borrows" money he will never repay, with whom he makes dates he never keeps or from whom he buys the liquor that is alternately his salvation, his personal devil and his end-all - all these people are seen only from Don Birnam's view; they are important only in so far as they reflect his situation or supply the background for his lyrical ad ventures.

If Don Birnam were more purely comic he would be Mr. Toad; if he were more purely tragic he would be Hamlet.

What makes him such an Ancient Mariner for the unwilling but fascinated reader is that he epitomizes the quiet desperation that many an ordinary American oc casionally feels in himself.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.