[In the following excerpted review of several new novels, West says that Nemerov's Federigo, or the Power of Love has a good deal of wit but is too heavy-handed and surrealistic.]

Howard Nemerov's Federigo, or the Power of Love, contains more skill of execution than David Wagoner's novel [The Man in the Middle], and it is unmistakably comic. Given a modern setting, it is nevertheless, as its old-fashioned title suggests, consciously based on the medieval fabliau. Essentially, it is the story of Julian Ghent's attempt to provide a situation where he, approaching middle-age, may be untrue to his wife, Sylvia. This he does by writing letters to himself implying his wife's unfaithfulness and signing them Federigo, the name of a little-known acquaintance. He is moved to this act, not by the attraction of any particular woman, but, we gather, out of boredom and in the romantic belief that life is passing him by.

The letters work in an amusing fashion, opening the way for Julian's attempts at unfaithfulness, but disclosing him, in fact, incapable of it. They also convince Sylvia that, since she has acquired the reputation for infidelity, she might as well enjoy its pleasures; but her experience turns out to be the opposite of Julian's: the young man with whom she has had a casual relationship becomes frightened by her aroused aggressiveness. Thus, neither is successful in consummating an affair, but they are, by the intrigue of their unmarried partners, led back to each other in a riotous scene of mistaken identity, where they find themselves in bed together, the disclosure made by detectives Julian had hired to spy on Sylvia.

So far, so good. The situation is impossible, but disguised by that air of probability which can make such farce-comedy highly effective. The difficulty is that this slight and amusing tale is extended to the size of a full-length novel with both Faustian and Freudian overtones. Julian and Sylvia are led through scenes at cocktail parties, weddings, psychiatrists' offices, and amorous rendezvous, too often with a heavy-handedness that weakens the essential “fabulous” nature of the tale. Not that the novel might not have carried such overtones, but it should have done so in a different manner, for the comic note demands a quick, light touch, while here one comes to feel, finally, that Julien and Sylvia are being bludgeoned back into each other's arms.

Mr. Nemerov seems somewhat aware of his heaviness when he writes at the end of his novel: “This is a very old story, and when it used to be told in what may have been in some respects a simpler age, it would have ended, perhaps, like this: ‘… and the married couple, when they perceived how astoundingly and justly they had been diddled’—or ‘saved,’ depending on the sort of person narrating the tale—‘resolved ever after to be true to one another.’” For my own part, I should have preferred such an ending (and, in a sense, got it, as I think Mr. Nemerov actually intended that I should). But the concept of “a simplified age” is a trap, for even the complexities of an age (if one age is more complex than another, as we like to think our own is today) may be displayed in a simple form, as André Gide has demonstrated in such a novel as Lafcadio's Adventures. Actually, too, of course, Mr. Nemerov's married couple returns to fidelity with a comic relief, as surely and as humorously as any ancient or medieval couple ever did.

The ubiquitous Federigo, who enters the novel, not only as the alleged author of Julien's notes, but also as Mephistopheles to Julien's Faustus and as Julien's alter ego, might have remained as sufficient excuse for the novel's modern setting. What cluttered the action and blunted the point of the story was, I think, the attempt to gain complexity by spelling out in too much detail the various relationships of Sylvia and Julien in terms of modern religion, science, business, and the social life of the New York middle-class. In short, what the novel lacked was “simplicity and unity.” “The excellence and charm of arrangement,” Horace once wrote, “… consists in this,—to say at each and every time just what should at that time be said, and to defer a very great part of what might be said, and for the nonce omit it.”

Both Mr. Wagoner and Mr. Nemerov are young American novelists. They reflect what has become a tendency in recent American fiction to avoid social realism and to adopt a kind of surrealistic formalism as a means of expressing modern life. There is nothing wrong with this in itself, and I do not wholly share Malcolm Cowley's fears that such a method reflects a basic insecurity in the present generation. Neither do I believe, as Stanley Edgar Hyman seems to do, that fable and allegory are the masks through which the contemporary novelist may say what would otherwise be denied him. Such forms are new in the American tradition and they demand a degree of skill (a precise unity) heretofore seldom achieved by American novelists. In opposition to Mr. Cowley, I should say that such attempts as have been made by David Wagoner and Howard Nemerov display courage, not timidity, and that their failures result from attempting that which they are not yet capable of achieving.