A Compassionate View

THE BEAT OF LIFE, by Barbara Probst Solomon. Lippincott & Co.

With sympathy and honesty, Barbara Probst Solomon has written a book about her own generation. In The Beat of Life the “beat” and the “silent” young are not being ruthlessly parodied, or attacked by older intellectuals who have never shared their problems. There are no accusations of apathy and aimlessness here, nor will Mrs. Solomon’s contemporaries have to listen with embarrassment as they are blamed for living badly in a rotten world. Instead the conditions of that world, and what they do to two young lives, are set before us in a deliberately uncompli. cated story whose purpose is to describe and understand before criticizing. This attempt alone would make the novel unique, but the fact that the writer succeeds in understanding and in maintaining a compassionate tone throughout, makes it a great pleasure to read.

Timothy Lanahan and Natasha Thompson, the hero and heroine, live out their hapless love affair almost in hiding, asking nothing of a world so distant from their own concerns that it seems to demand nothing of them. One might say that they are “free”—but only in a totally negative sense of the word. They are free from family life, from parental authority, from traditions of any sort, from material want, perhaps even from moral imperatives. It is the sort of freedom one has when the only life possible is utterly formless. Natasha...