It is some time now since a reviewer was moved to write, concerning a reference to the late Mr. Dillinger in one of Miss Boyle's earlier works, that a reference to Senator Borah in the New Testament could not be more astonishing. Miss Boyle is still far removed from her own, her native land, but she has come to reveal a growing preoccupation with the little tragedies attending the present era of European politics, and no one, I am sure, could ask for a clearer view of the impulses that have driven so many plain folk to Hitlerism than Miss Boyle has conveyed through one of the characters in this novel. The violence is still shadowy, the gust of wind is still but a whiff of smoke, and Miss Boyle is as devoted to the exquisite phrase as ever, but Death of a Man has something to say that may be considered above and beyond the precious and the pale.

Miss Boyle's story revolves around the critical events in Austria two years ago that culminated in the assassination of Dollfuss, but it is principally concerned with the tortuous affair between an American girl and a Nazi doctor. It is in the delineation of their respective values, if not in the actual conflict between them, that Miss Boyle is at her best; subtly descriptive, the former offers a literal contrast between the rooted and the uprooted, and composes the memorable portion of the novel. Prochaska himself is a bundle of attitudes, monotonous and warped, but he indicates a philosophy, and it is the philosophy of the many who were led from a revolt against the peace-treaty, the bitter poverty and the humiliation imposed on Austria to faith in a sullen house-painter.

The girl is a spiritual descendant of those unhappy Americans who swarm through the novels of Henry James; in our day a younger sister to the lost generation. Provided with post-war phrases cannot escape, she participates in her lover's activities, but without his passion, and untroubled by his needs. Their affair does not last very long, for she is too conscious of the basic antagonism between them. In her pre-climax soliloquy she repeats the traditional gesture of renunciation, the decade-long complaint of the Brett Ashleys on their European lovers, be they bull-fighters or revolutionaries:

"What he's never said to me is he believes in something; fighting like a tool for something, and I haven't even got that to make me look like a good imitation of somebody going somewhere and caring where they're going."

The difference between the lovers, however, is not a dramatic difference, for the conflict between them is only stated, prepared for us; it is rarely illuminated by the events in the narrative, and then but fitfully. Prochaska is not a vivid character, but he is sufficiently characterized to make us sense the burden that drives him forward, that allows him to be casual about bombings and cynical about assassination. The girl is even less of a creation, being unintegrated, but we come to understand her predicament. When they draw together, nevertheless, when Miss Boyle attempts to set the basic line of her narrative, the book flounders.

That is largely due, it seems to me, to the fact that the story is built on sand; for all the width and realism of their background, Miss Boyle's characters carry on a private life of their own, full of sudden torments and whispered desires, and her main interest, it is plain, is in the influence of politics on the soul or the temperament, not in its effect on the outward life of men or the pattern of their society. The corners of existence, the mysterious impulse, the silent, tragic act; sex as the joker in the pack—Miss Boyle has used them for her themes over and over again, and it makes little difference here that, considered as a part against the whole, they form little more than a rustle in the drapery.

What it comes to in the end is that we are much too conscious of Miss Boyle's art and not enough of its use toward a significant end; her subtlety is what we remember, not the material through which it is transmitted; and it is a subtlety, in effect, that is reduced to swinging in a void. Death of a Man is not simply a book that fails; with all its good points, it decomposes into trivial effects and still-life pictures. Miss Boyle writes a better prose than most of us find nowadays, but it does not conceal the gaping holes in her narrative; it is a prose that comes to be read for its own sake, and we derive our pleasure from its superb diction, its precision and its beat, not from what it arranges in the narrative, or what it reflects of the turns in human character and conduct.