On the Shelf

Major Advocate, whose face has been lifted nearly half a dozen times in the last three years, has finally undergone a real clean-up job. The current issue exhibits more variety, more imagination in planning, and less rubbish than any in recent seasons.

On the matter of individual effort, however, things are not so rosy. The big gun in the salve of diversity, William E. Wiggin's weighty sociological analysis of the Jew at Harvard, seems to have little meaning. His statistics are interesting (if true); but just why he was impelled to write the article is unclear. That Harvard's Jewish students rank high scholastically, that they are active in extra-curricular groups, and that they are not in the clubs are facts well-known to those who care about them. It's a fine idea to run non-fiction research articles; but this reviewer cannot see the raison d'etre of a basically divisive statistical outline.

John Ciardi's "Middle Muddle" presents an interesting, tightly-written exposition of his own political beliefs. It is the only such exposition that I have seen where the writing has been cogent enough to carry the author's ideas to a reader with clarity and conviction, separating the frankly muddled liberals in the Progressive Party from its not-so-forthright adherents.

Of the two fiction pieces in the issue, "The Gooks" seemed a better job than Dennis Fodor's dialogue story. The former is a fine study of its three soldier principals, with restrained dialogue and subtle development; the latter is too glib, too flashy in dialogue without the insights and basings necessary for a competent story. This comparison is not intentional nor malicious, but successive reading of the two stories brings out rather sharply that what is good in one is the chief failing of the other.

Perhaps the most interesting selection in the magazine is John Snow's critique of "The Naked and The Dead." Snow manages to take apart the professional critics neatly and without an undue display of emotion, and then proceeds to point out the qualities of Mailer's novel which never occurred to those who typed him as a straight Dos Passos-Hemingway disciple. This is a considered review which stresses affirmative qualities in the novel unnoticed by most commentators.

Howard Koeper may know a great deal about architecture, but his attack on the planning and interior decoration of the Lamont Library seems hardly justified in view of its functional success. The architects' lack of imagination is somewhat balanced, as in Littauer and Houghton, by efficient interior design.

But regardless of the individual articles, the editors have accomplished a great deal in this issue to put their magazine on a more stable basis. The spread of subject matter is probably the only thing that will save a sagging circulation; it also makes for a far more readable Advocate.