[An American editor and author, Finn worked for the journals Commonweal, Worldview, and Christian Century, in succession, and published several books about war and pacificism. In the following laudatory review of Lines of Life, he briefly discusses the novel's place in Mauriac' s body of work and then assesses it as a great work of art]

Lines of Life, published first in France in 1928 under the title Destins, is part of the "early" Mauriac, those six or seven novels that made him a standard and symbol for young writers in the thirties. It was primarily this group of novels against which the bien pensants leveled charges of "unwholesome" and "corrupt," these novels which M. Mauriac had in mind when he wrote his brilliant apologia, God and Mammon.

Readers who approach M. Mauriac for the first time through the recent, and excellent, translations of Gerard Hopkins may have some difficulty in understanding the furor which attended their first publication, the heightened criticism and praise which was once the author's regular fare. For M. Mauriac, whose literary "position" may not yet be settled, is so established an author that he is readily ignored, and temporarily overshadowed, by the new novelists, who are also, supposedly, more daring. He is a winner of the Nobel Prize and is happily accepted by readers and critics whose counterparts once eagerly pilloried him. Time and M. Mauriac's fame thus act, unfortunately, as a buffer between his early novels and the reader.

But if the literary life and atmosphere of the twenties and thirties are hard to recover, the reasons for the excited reception of the author's early works are still to be found in the works themselves. As is almost every valid work of art, Lines of Life is subversive. It reveals what we did not know or chose to ignore. It disturbs and unsettles easy presumptions and conventions. It challenges our complacencies.

Lines of Life is set in the famili, against the strict conventions which guide their lives, are highlighted the virtues and, even more conspicuously, the grave, unlikable failings of the middle-class. The Lagaves and the Gornacs are not born to love, despise or hate; they are less committed one to another than they are to their land, to the forests and vines. Both Maria Lagave and Jean Gornac, her employer, agree that two boys—and no more—are essential to a family, one to look after the estate, the other to be employed by the State.

These standards and goals remain unchallenged until Maria's grandson is born. Robert Lagave enters his closely bound society as a "representative of the hostile race," those who experience the pangs and pleasures of love. Very early he recognizes his body as the only god he knows. As early as his eighteenth birthday, he is conscious of his passing youth and youthful charm; each additional birthday brings sadness. Before his twenty-third birthday, however, his ephemeral charm has won him the admiring attention of a fashionable, corrupt circle of friends.

The lines of young Lagave's life cross those of many people. He arouses jealousy in those who lack his knowledge of love; dismay and repulsion in a fiancée who suddenly encounters a revelation of his corrupt life; love, and subsequent loneliness, in an older woman who had remained lethargically unaware of either; and disapproval and confusion in the minds of others.

With his customary astonishing economy Mauriac creates scenes of great intensity. The heavy summer heat presses upon the countryside. No leaf stirs; no voice breaks the silence. And upon the hot, cracked ground the lovers lie together, while those whose love is unreturned ache with loneliness. Others, concerned only with the land, remain unaware of and uninterested in the eruptions of human passion. Their lives move with the rhythm of the seasons, and are fulfilled in devotion to the land.

As the destinies of these people intersect, each leaves his mark upon the other. The direction of the novel is to show that "the marks left by one individual on another are eternal, and not with impunity can some other's destiny cross our own." Because Mauriac has attempted to show these people in all their wounded nature, because he has attempted to reflect a world where evil is palpable yet mysterious—and because he has done both so successfully—he has been severely criticized. Mauriac himself has given an answer to those charges. He acknowledges that a presence broods over the action of his early novels, that evil is a reality and many of the characters corrupt or broken. But his characters, asserts M. Mauriac, have souls. They acknowledge the eternal consequences of their actions. And he has not been tempted to the pleasant falsehoods so many readers expect to find in works by a Catholic author.

Some readers may find M. Mauriac's self-accounting unsatisfactory, however subtle and sincere. Others will accept his apologies as brilliant introspections of a true artist, but as gratuitous offerings. For these early novels are true works of art which now surpass and will surely survive their justification.