[In the following review, Loprete offers a negative assessment of Poor George.]

George Mecklin, the hero (or anti-hero, if you prefer) of this slim and over-priced first novel [Poor George], is a teacher in a private school in Manhattan to which he commutes by train from his rented Westchester cottage. George is married to Emma, a part-time librarian at Columbia. Immediately the reader suspects that here is another academic novel dealing with the inner workings of the teacher's world. But the reader is wrong. George Mecklin the man engages Miss Fox's attention, not George Mecklin the teacher. When George discovers a teenage delinquent-in-the-making hiding in his home, he offers to tutor him. Ernest the adolescent is the catalyst of this book. By the time you have finished reading, you have met the hypocritical Devlins; a narcissistic actor and his alcoholic wife; George's sister Lila and her son, Claude; and an assortment of type-teachers. Nor is this all. Emma, who has resented George's interest in Ernest, deliberately allows Ernest to seduce her. At the conclusion, the Mecklins have separated; George is recovering from a bullet wound inflicted because of an incredible adventure as a Peeping-Tom; Ernest is dead—the victim of a beating by a young hoodlum.

Poor George is a pretentious book filled with self-analysis and self-pity. In an outrageous example of dust-jacket hyperbole, we are told that the novel "carries to a new depth a permanent theme in American literature—the theme of innocence." I disagree. It is boredom that is carried to a new depth. There is no communication among the flat people in this novel. They address words to each other, but no one seems to listen. They are on different wave-lengths; they speak in tongues to disguise true feelings. They do not respect each other as human beings because they are nothing more than cardboard characters cut from the same pattern. My sympathies to the "poor reader" if he chooses Poor George.