[In the following excerpted review, Cook praises the authenticity of The Pledge, though finds fault in Fast's literary ability.]

To their everlasting discredit, American novelists, most of them, have conscientiously avoided the big subjects since the war. All exceptions granted, those whom we hold in highest esteem today seem to work small.

Take, for example, the red witchhunt period of the '40s and '50s, otherwise known as the McCarthy era. (Actually, it was well under way before Tail-Gunner Joe made his appearance.) Although relevant histories and biographies appear every season, few works of fiction by established writers have dealt with this period. It was a theme, one of a few, in Lionel Trilling's The Middle of the Journey. It formed the plot of Frederick Buechner's The Return of Ansel Gibbs, which not many remember now. But of the important novelists of the postwar period, only Norman Mailer has given it serious attention—in two novels, The Barbary Shore and The Deer Park.

But now, practically simultaneously, two novels about this shameful period have been published. One, The Pledge, by Howard Fast, was predictable, perhaps even inevitable. The other, The Big Nowhere [by James Ellroy], comes as something of a surprise. …

Howard Fast has done something quite different. His novel, The Pledge, takes the red witchhunt following World War II directly as its subject. He meets it head-on, just as the witchhunt once met Howard Fast himself. Today's best-selling author of chronicles depicting upwardly mobile protagonists in their battles to get to the top (books such as The Immigrant and The Outsider) was himself jailed for contempt of Congress during that period. He refused to give the House Committee on Un-American Activities names it already had. At the time he was already well established as a novelist, with at least a couple of bestsellers to his credit—Citizen Tom Paine and Spartacus.

Bruce Bacon, the young hero of The Pledge, is not quite so well known. A reporter, and a good one, he had earned a solid reputation for himself as a war correspondent in Europe. We pick him up in Calcutta, post VE Day, where he has gone to finish out the war. (Why there and not the South Pacific is anybody's guess.) There is a rice famine: millions are dying in Bengal. Local communists prove to him that there is rice enough to feed the starving population. The Muslim merchants are holding it back with the connivance of the British colonial authorities. Bacon tries to get this story out and gets kicked out of the China-Burma-India Theater for his trouble. Back in New York he starts to write a book about the war that will include the famine story. That's when his troubles really begin.

A word about Bruce Bacon. Simply put, he's a stiff. People are always telling him how innocent he is, saying he's an Eagle Scout. Well, he is, sort of—but he is also rather thick-headed, all too confident that his reputation as a reporter and his comfortable upper-middle class background will see him through every sort of test.

As a matter of fact, the reader may find himself rather bored with Bruce (that awful WASP name!) and will welcome the entrance of Molly Maguire on page 77. This is a woman with some style. An Irish-Catholic from Boston, she has become a communist without giving up her religion; she is passionately both a Catholic and a communist. She also becomes Bruce Bacon's passionate lover. A reporter for The Daily Worker, she is well-informed about the threat to the reds posed by the HUAC and the FBI. She is not in the least surprised when personal pressure from J. Edgar Hoover forces publisher after publisher to turn down Bruce's book. Nor is she astonished when he is brought before the Committee to answer questions on his contracts with communists in India and New York. Although he is not then and never was a member of the Communist Party, Molly of course is. Her name comes up, and he refuses to name her as a communist.

(Another word here: Howard Fast presents his communists realistically in The Pledge: there are careerists and tunnel-visioned true believers among them, just as there are idealists who need a dream to hold onto. Fast himself was a Communist Party member until 1956, when he broke with it over Soviet repression of the Hungarian revolution.)

Bruce is convicted on charges of contempt of Congress and sentenced to a year in prison. The section of The Pledge covering Bruce's imprisonment—roughly the last hundred pages—is wonderfully written, as though it were from a different book entirely. But it's from no book at all; it's written from life—Howard Fast's own. Bruce Bacon comes out of prison a better man, as I suspect the author also did, having learned a lot about himself and common humanity.

If the rest of the book could only have been written as honestly from the well of personal experience, The Pledge might have been that novel on the witchhunt that we still look for. We may never find it. Those best prepared by experience seem unequipped as writers.