[An esteemed American critic, essayist, and social historian, Howe was a member of the "New York Intellectuals"—a group of liberal, socialist writers that included, among others, Philip Rahv and Lionel Trilling—and is perhaps best remembered for World of Our Fathers (1976), his history of Jewish-American culture and immigration to New York City. In the following excerpt from a review in which he also discusses Mauriac's work of nonfiction entitled The Stumbling Block, he examines the two short works collected as The Weakling and The Enemy. Howe describes Le Sagouin—here translated as The Weakling—as "one of the few successful works of religious fiction written in our time. "]

[The Weakling and the Enemy] actually contains two long stories, The Enemy, published in France 17 years ago, and The Weakling, which came out last year. Though the idea of sewing a book together from two unrelated items is dubious, and the slyness of the jacket irritating, there is a certain value in having these two pieces together. From them one can surmise something of Mauriac's development; the first revealing his inner troubles as Catholic and artist, the second suggesting at least a partial resolution.

The Enemy is a portrait of a boy brought up in a milieu of Jansenist piety, who in late adolescence is exposed to a woman of beauty and sensuality, a woman who lives by pleasure and love. What follows is predictable to anyone who has read a dozen French novels: passion in Paris, ennui, a reappearance of the boy's religious scruples, and the hysteria of the abandoned woman.

For all its aroma of canned Proust, The Enemy is a competent fiction, suavely faithful to the French prescription for illicit love, persuasive in its study of the boy's emotions. Unfortunately, however, the two parts of the story remain unfused: the flesh and the faith come neither to peace nor to grips. If anything, the flesh has the better of it; and we can understand why French Catholic critics rebuked Mauriac in the twenties and thirties as a refined sensualist, who was careful to renew his option with God—and why Mauriac, in a blaze of anguish and anger, cried out, "Christianity makes no allowance for the flesh; it abolishes it."

By contrast, The Weakling seems to me one of the few successful works of religious fiction written in our time. The old Parisian triviality has been stripped away; nothing remains of Mauriac's earlier fondness for the decorative and voluptuous; the story is clearly allegorical yet does not hurl this fact at the reader; and the characters, neither "round" nor "flat," are appalling gargoyles—monsters come alive from a Goya picture. In a French village after the first world war, a coarse but ambitious middle-class girl marries into a crumbling noble family. Her son, slowminded and unloved, becomes an issue of struggle between herself and the family. The boy is put out to a Communist schoolteacher, a decent man strapped by dogma; and for the first time, because the teacher treats him with kindness, the boy begins to feel himself part of a living world. But then the family pulls him back; the schoolmaster refuses responsibility for this child of the upper classes. And the boy, abandoned by the agents of the aristocracy, the middle-class and the revolution, is left entirely to himself. In a scene of gruesome power, he wanders off to a pond and drowns himself.

Mauriac renders the squalor of the village with such economy and directness that it soon comes to seem a symbol of the modern world. The intentions behind his allegory of withdrawn love are obvious enough; but The Weakling is an impressive work of art because it surmounts categories and, despite Mauriac's doctrinal bias, can be "translated" into any serious mode of thought or feeling. If there is to be a religious fiction in our time worthy of serious respect, I think it will take this form: brusquely allegorical, harshly written, almost uncouth in its disregard for the usual decor of the novel. . . .