[In the following negative review of Morning Noon and Night, the critic contends that Cozzens's attempt to expose "the reality beneath pretension" is undermined by a ponderous prose style.]

The narrator of Mr. Cozzens's new novel [Morning Noon and Night] is Henry (Hank) Dodd Worthington, the sexagenarian founder and head of H.W. Associates, a firm of industrial management consultants preeminent in that field. The novel is presented in the form of a meditation on his life, or lives, and those of his ancestors, an inquiry that may be meaningful to others in so far as it is also an inquiry into the meaning of life at different ages and on different stages. H.W., the public figure, is as highly regarded as he is successful. But Hank has done many shameful things, the ill consequences of which he has avoided only by good luck; and the good management, in which his company specializes, is only the exercise of common sense in those chosen conditions where common sense gives an answer.

I remember a line of Montaigne's: Amusing notion; many things I would not want to tell anyone, I tell the public. I see what he means. Droll indeed the reflection that informing against yourself to one person is often imprudent, but not informing against yourself to the whole world. There you can count on a strange but true safety in numbers.

This reflection may be true of Montaigne or Mr. Cozzens or any other writer. But it is not true of Henry Worthington, whose confessions made to the whole world would do even more damage to the business reputation of himself and H.W. Associates than a private avowal; and well would he know it, if he had half the shrewdness he professes.

This basic flaw in the presentation of the novel is not concealed by the style which the author has given H.W. The descendant of a long line of professors and a broken line of writers. H.W., having taken his A.M. in English literature, has played with, but rejected, the ideas of teaching and writing. After starting in the "amusing" business of collecting debts in Boston, he has with the aid of inherited money and acquired school and college friends built up his consultancy business first in that city, then in the ultramodernity of Madison Avenue, and finally in the Georgian replica of good taste outside New York City, having had a safe and successful war in the Air Force. He is very much a man of his times, not the phoney red who got worked up about Sacco and Vanzetti, the evils of the Depression and the threat of fascism, but the percipient man who broke only with the old establishment to establish himself with the new.

The way he expresses himself is a rococo version of the way in which Mr. Cozzens expressed himself in By Love Possessed. The rhythms are similar but exaggerated. Mr. Cozzens's literary hesitation becomes a stammer. Where one word will do justly, Mr. Cozzens uses a dozen and Henry Worthington a score.

Normal aging's occasional distresses of sudden visceral ill ease, desultory muscle twinge, and hard-to-diagnose ache of bone and stiffening of joint visit me. Old skin, now too slowly renewed, suffers routine itches and allergy rashes. The breath of the image shortens, and, because it now sweats so easily, drafts need to be guarded against. Long ago glasses began to be required for reading. In eating employed now the partial dental prosthetic devices. Heating may soon have to be aided electrically. Yes many and sharp, if not yet very sharp, those numerous ills (the old mind is nervous and worrisome) inwoven with our frame.

His sentiments are often crudities condited in the recondite.

… inappetency may well decide that a one only right name for the malodorous grapple, the damp assault on the subventral slit, the seesaw pump of in-and-out, the breakoff, spent and soiled, must be not loving, but, blunt and unvarnished screwing.

Mr. Cozzens is a deliberate writer, whose ponderosity is contrived to his own satisfaction. If the reader can take a short story cut so elaborately long, there is much in Morning Noon and Night which is shrewd or wise. The point of view, presented as H.W.'s (but the author's own?), has the merit of singularity; a complex attitude, apparently exposing the reality beneath pretension while really erecting an entirely different pretentiousness over the exposure.