Jane Rule's fifth novel [The Young in One Another's Arms] will probably be the first to find a wide audience, since it comes after the success of a timely work of non-fiction [Lesbian Images] and a gust of publicity. Two national magazines have already introduced to the whole country a woman who came across in her interviews as attractive, brilliant, courageous, enormously talented, industrious and—perhaps most appealingly of all—neglected. This combination adumbrates the way in which a large part of literary Canada likes to see itself, and Jane Rule thus appeared in these magazines as quintessentially Canadian. The image is even enhanced by the fact that she was born and bred in the United States.

I am one of those readers for whom the fifth novel is the first, one who admired Lesbian Images and looked forward to reading more Rule. I am disappointed, and my feelings go beyond the usual disappointment of finding that a writer has not written the book I expected. In this case, she has not even written either of the two books she seemed to promise in the early pages of the present novel. The first book she hasn't written is the story of that mysterious creature, the woman of 50; the second is the story of the flight of the American anti-war young to sanctuary in Canada. What she has written is the standard Canadian novel of retreat from urban evil to woodsy good, and in doing so has reached some surprising depths in sentimentality and tedium.

The setting is Vancouver, where Ruth Wheeler, one-armed as the result of an accident, lives with her mother-in-law (the name Ruth is no accident) and runs a boarding house for six lodgers. Five of them are the young who are frequently in one another's arms, and the sixth is a dim-witted shoe-clerk for whom Ruth feels responsible. But for whom does she not feel responsible? Ruth is a saint….

The men of the house are the usual weaklings and misfits who make such an appeal to many women writers….

With such a cast of characters much can happen, and much does—but with a strange effect of unreality since most of the action takes place off stage. These boarders exist in a climate of such cool permissiveness that attachments between them form and dissolve in a dreamy, meaningless manner; there is no emotion or interest generated by these changes and exchanges, reported but never explained…. (p. 3)

Indeed, much of the writing in this book does suggest the protracted case history of a multi-problem family as recorded by a social worker in the approved "non-judgmental" manner. For while Miss Rule contrives big scenes and raises big issues, she never fails to withdraw from them into flashbacks and ruminations. Under the busy crowded surface of the novel there lies an intractable passivity.

The second half of the book moves the group, now further altered by one death and the arrival of a newcomer, to an island community off Vancouver where they are to live communally and run a restaurant. In no time at all they are also delivering meals on wheels, operating a nursery school for neglected children, splitting firewood for the elderly, and in general behaving like a troop of badge-mad Boy Scouts. The sheer goodness of it all is difficult to take; it is also as unreal as everything else in the book, since these chores are performed without a single aching muscle, bead of sweat, or word of complaint. But by now it is clear that the novel's action has become little more than a self-indulgent reverie of the author's.

The book ends with all difficulties overcome…. The young are still in one another's arms, still safe and sheltered in the love of the rock-like Ruth.

It is hard to make goodness interesting, but the problem is not solved by making it sentimental…. The Young in One Another's Arms cannot, in the end, be regarded as anything but popular women's-magazine fiction. It is only fair to say that it makes no pretence of being anything else. (p. 4)