[Brooks was an American critic, novelist and journalist. In the following review of Morning Noon and Night, he examines the novel's structure, Puritan themes, eccentric prose style, and plot.]

In 1957, when James Gould Cozzens' By Love Possessed finally appeared, nine years after his last previous novel, Guard of Honor, it was instantly pronounced a masterwork by critical and popular acclaim and, an almost incredibly short time thereafter, it was dismissed (by what eventually came to be at least general critical assent) as a fake masterwork. On rereading, it seems to be neither, but rather a sound, skillful and entertaining portrayal of a part of American life marred, as Mr. Cozzens' earlier work had seldom been, by pretensions to both a style and a significance that were simply beyond its natural scope. One way and another, the book became a great cause célèbre: The reactions to it became, in themselves, a parable of the literary life, a write-it-your-self novel, obscuring the merits—obscuring the very being—of the novel that had actually been written.

Now, after a lapse this time of 11 years (broken by publication of Children and Others, a short-story collection), Mr. Cozzens has at last let a new novel go out of his workshop, and obviously he and it are very much on the spot. Has he bowed to the critics of By Love Possessed by returning to the simpler style and more manageable subject matter of his earlier novels? Or defied them by pressing the eccentric innovations of that book still further? Well, he has done both, and neither—he has ignored the critics. Whatever else one may say for or against Morning Noon and Night, it makes clear beyond cavil its author's austere, magisterial, almost relentless disregard for literary fashion.

Morning Noon and Night sets out to be a searching study of the Puritan heart and mind (as The Just and the Unjust was of the American law, for example, and Guard of Honor of the American military). No character more than remotely mentioned in it is of other than Puritan ancestry. The world it describes is as parochially Eastern Anglo-Saxon Protestant as, say, that of Saul Bellow's Herzog is North American Jewish. Its hero and narrator is Henry Dodd Worthington, a successful management consultant in his sixties and beginning to feel his mortality intensely; its content is his memoirs.

Henry's background is classically genteel: father a Chaucer specialist at and finally president of a small, respectable Eastern college; grandfathers likewise professors; parents (like those of so many such people) distantly related to each other. His life story is unsurprising: placid campus boyhood; good prep school; sexual initiation at a genteel beach resort with a married neighbor lady of his parents' generation; Harvard; an abortive attempt to become a writer; marriage to the daughter of a high-church Episcopal clergyman; a few years' fling at a raffish job (maliciously arranged for him by a stern uncle) as a bill collector; the formation of the firm that is to bring him success; high-level, noncombatant military service in World War II; divorce; remarriage to a lifelong acquaintance who has been for some years his secretary.

At the time of his writing, his only daughter is bitterly facing her third divorce. His first wife, also embittered, is dying. His second wife is dead by what seems to have been suicide. He has come to realize that his relationship with his late beloved business partner was based in part on a cynical deception he had been guilty of as a schoolboy. Now, very much alone, he is asking himself, "What is this life? Who am I? What is this 'I' in me?"

A banal life, then; there is less story here than in any other Cozzens novel except Castaway, the other sport among the author's works. Surely this is intentional. Where Mr. Cozzens wants the highlight to fall is on Henry Worthington's style and ideas, the essence of his inherited Puritanism. His manner of telling his story is free-associational (and sometimes plain haphazard) rather than chronological or logically consecutive.

There is no attempt at suspense, the narration consisting of ruminations interrupted, not very frequently, by "stage plays of memory" in which the only action and dialogue occur. The first stage play (hardly one of memory) gives warning of what is to come. It is a description in elementary-science-textbook terms (sperm, Fallopian tubes, gametes, zygote), of the mating of his parents at which he was conceived. Here, as elsewhere, a tendency to laughably clinical exactitude and factual detail on the subject of sex seems to mask, or deny, embarrassment.

Henry's prose style is eccentric in the extreme. In the "stage plays," he inclines to nervous shiftings between the present and past tenses, and between the first and third persons. Where he uses the third person, he himself when younger often becomes "our Hank" or "our excited boy," as in the conventional fiction of a century ago. Always he inclines to sentence inversion, the passive voice, the ablative absolute, the long-obsolete usage, and other devices that create an effect, not so much of "old-fashioned grandiloquence" (a key phrase from By Love Possessed), as of archness and pomposity. Sometimes he writes purest old-fashioned Time-style: "In April died the old Secretary of Navy, and raised to his place was the Under Secretary."

And his ruminations? Henry (or "our Hank") thinks of them as "sagacity," partly in irony and partly not, but to the reader they come out as highly uneven in wisdom content. To the "Who am I?" query he replies, with resolute contempt for psychological self-analysis—perhaps inherited from a grandfather who was a renowned anti-Freudian—"Don't ask me." Here is a sampling of his apothegms:

"Legend's very nature must make for the struck pose, the formal stance, the act put on."

"Never the great and powerful, but only those of little or no real power will hurt for hurting's sake."

"The very fact that a man is a man and by that fact controlled (homo est!) is going to make him, reluct though he may, find—if not think, then feel—many very human things alien to him."

"Ingestion of beverage alcohol, not or not often to real excess, yet steady and systematic, has penalties."

Why does Henry talk, or write, that way? In part, it would seem, simply because he is something of a windbag when it comes to discussing himself. At times, the reader suspects that he has failed at human relationships not because of the excessive success-drive, the inherited streak of deviousness, and the sexual inhibition that he states or hints are the reasons, but because he has bored everybody close to him to distraction. But certainly he is not all windbag, as his huge professional success in management consulting (an occupation that is described, in the Cozzens tradition, with scrupulous fidelity) attests. There is a solid core of good sense, hard-earned skill, and natural perception in Henry. Perhaps his circumlocutory banalities are the outcome of an attitude toward the world more defensive than he cares to admit, and this is essentially a book about chronic embarrassment.

Since it certainly does not seem to have been so intended, and since it fails to deeply engage the reader's mind or heart as such, Morning Noon and Night has to be accounted a failure. Marquand's George Apley is pretty much of a bore (and so, for that matter, is Herzog) but the novels in which they appear succeed because of the authors' controlled mixture of irony and detached affection toward their heroes. Mr. Cozzens' attitude toward Worthington, as seen through Worthington's attitude toward himself, wavers uncertainly between irony and identification.

Because, along the way, Worthington expresses many ideas that the author himself has expressed in the past—a conservative outlook on human affairs in general, frank distrust of intellectual liberals, disdain for writers' conferences—and because of the tone of the whole book, one finds more than a hint here of a personal testament. Indeed, the reader wonders whether he is meant to discern the author's voice—the voice of one of the master craftsmen in American fiction in our time—behind Henry Worthington's valedictory, delivered after a last "stage play" in which Henry, as a boy, on a trip abroad with his parents, wanders out among classical ruins at sunset, knowing that in a few moments he will be ordered to bed, and thinks about the endings of things: "Good night, any surviving dear old Carian guests. Good night, ladies. Good night, all."

This reader, who has had so much pleasure in so many Cozzens novels and looks forward to more, certainly hopes not.