[In her first novel, The Spoil of The Flowers,] Mrs. Grumbach demonstrated real skill in handling a large number of characters without falling prey to fictional elephantiasis. With delicacy and care, she told us the relevant information about each character, displayed her in a characteristic posture, then picked up another character to repeat the performance, weaving a pattern into which everything would fit. Small, neat and consistently interesting, it was more than a competent first novel.

In her [The Short Throat, The Tender Mouth] (title courtesy of Chaucer, but a poor choice, for all that), Mrs. Grumbach uses the same technique until the final section, but her subject has broadened and deepened, her cast of characters become more complex, and what was successful in the first book is less so in the second. Indeed, so much is wrong with the choice of technique that the book, despite a subject of much potential depth, finally fails almost completely.

And yet, having said that, it remains to say more, and that in praise of both the conception and the intelligence that supports it. The novel is set in Washington Square College of New York University in 1939…. Mrs. Grumbach recalls it for us, not with nostalgia, but with scrupulous reconstruction of the feel of the times—the campus radicalism with its mixture of idealists and crude miniature Stalinists, the pervasive poverty of the students, the menaces of Fascism and war.

The possibilities of that time and that place are indeed rich. But Mrs. Grumbach has written a book of some 181 pages—why? Such brevity allows only for a skimming of the surface, a look at a few ripples, and no stirring at all of the underground pools. The characters are conceived with originality…. But so many in so few pages! The pity of it is that they fade into stereotypes after promising more, squeezed as they are into such small space. (pp. 304-05)

Then, too, there is no center of interest in the book, only indications of a possible theme which are not sustained, until the final section, when Paul, the young poet, abruptly takes over in a first-person narration—and that, too, is a technical flaw, the sudden switch of narrative mode without any previous preparation. The action becomes melodramatic as Mrs. Grumbach tries to tie up all her story ends in so few pages, and the last remnants of credibility are swallowed up in the rapid summaries and flawed speeches which are intended to complete the action. The final impression, then, is of a novel heavy with promise that ends up by being too short because the author did not explore her subject or her characters with the thoroughness the material cries out for. (p. 306)