BOOKSHELF

"Confusion", a novel by J. G. Cozzens '26, is the biography of Cerise D'Atree. More significantly, it is a record of life as she found it: superficially, a tapestry of intricate, brilliant, and picturesque detail; inwardly, desperate and futile. There is nothing sordid or even tragic in any scene of this story to account for the complete disenchantment with life, which is the ultimate effect of the book as a whole. Its scenes are full of charm and delight and beauty, through which moves an extraordinary variety of real persons, most of whom accept the world at its face value and make the most of it.

Treatment Is Entirely Objective

Nor is there any stylistic distortion of facts to account for the impression the book makes, any morbid autorial analysis such as the "expressionism", that insane effect produced by filtering all impressions through the distorted vision of one character. The style is not in the least hysterical. The treatment is entirely objective.

The effect of the story is made, the theme is developed as themes should be, entirely in action. A girl with every advantage of noble family, education, beauty, health, strength, practical skill, intellect, and emotional sensitiveness lives with the freedom of wealth and position in the most delightful places on the Continent and in America, associates with the most agreeable acquaintances, companions, and friends . . . and dies. And the reader, not the author, closes the book with the conviction that for Cerise D'Atree, and perhaps for all others, life is a futile and desperate thing painful to leave, but terrible to endure, and therefore best to leave.

Those who wish to endanger their-souls with teleology will find authentic material in "Confusion". And the casual reader, who finds pleasure if not purpose in the records of life, will find in "Confusion" a breadth of canvas, a freshness of color, and a human interest worthy of an older master.