Not all the mistakes of America can be blamed on the State Department. Some are collective immoralities, such as the discrepancy between our pretensions as a land of refuge and our actual, eyedropper admission of refugees. Our quotas have been steadily reduced ever since Hitler came to power, in exact proportion as the need grew….

This, oddly enough, is the main theme of a first novel ["The Trespassers"] which includes a love story, a description of Freud's farewell meeting with the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and the case history of Jasper Crown, high-powered owner of a radio network, whose brutal drive toward success is motivated by fear of his own sexual sterility.

The novel, overburdened with symbolism, rocks between two parallel themes of rejection. "The Trespassers" on the earth, rejected by their own country and unwanted, apparently, by any other, are here represented by a Viennese psychoanalyst and his family, stranded in Switzerland. Their unknown benefactress in America, moving heaven, earth and the State Department to get them out, is involved in a destructive love affair with Jasper Crown. Although he has been passionately interested in disproving a diagnosis of sterility, he rejects her when she becomes pregnant. Under the circumstances this is a treacherous refusal of paternity, but I found the parallel—unborn child rejected by its fatherland—a little far-fetched. This is the kind of symbolism without emotional meaning which always runs the risk of being intellectually absurd. The motivation of Crown's fear of marriage and his drive toward power seems convincing. But as a character he remains pretty much the standard Ruthless Tycoon of fiction.

In fact, this half of the book seems to have been written in an emotional vacuum; all the warmth and directness of feeling are devoted to the refugee problem. This unevenness is reflected in the style….

What emerges from [Mrs. Hobson's] first novel is an honest anger at America's treatment of refugees, conveyed less by fictional means than by the reporting of facts and statistics. It would have been a good novel if this emotion had been conveyed by the story itself. For instance, the climax of the refugee theme is supposed to be the death of the doctor's wife, following a year of homelessness, dwindling hope and the hundred daily humiliations which the word "refugee" entails. Instead, she dies just in time to clear the field for a therapeutic romance between the doctor and the American woman.

"The Trespassers" does succeed in being a shocking book, but not because of its fearless revelations about sexual sterility. Mrs. Hobson has compiled a fairly complete record of another kind of sterility, including a world-wide and almost total failure of the imagination.