Whalen's You Didn't Even Try is amiable, rambling, intensely self-involved. Tired. Nothing very much happens and no one seems to mind, which is pleasant, but wearing—especially since the writing has so little to do with the liveliness of mind that forever mocks its own activities including those of the setting-down of words. The book alludes to varying recognizable tensions, actions (anxiety, affection, anger), yet Mr. Whalen seems preoccupied, at some tonal distance from the thing he is saying. What can one make of writing out of touch with the very feelings it is intending to convey? What is best in the book are those points where Kenneth, the protagonist, goes off on some distracted flight, an imaginative sidestepping where there is clear tonal accuracy.

"She was talking. He thought about nasturtiums, he'd seen a great field on a sloping hill-side in the park just for a moment on Saturday. It had been foggy the ground was dry the nasturtiums glowed…."

Yet even here there is some evasion in that the writing remains tentative, fails even after an entire scene to follow through. One is continually struck, in Whalen's poems, by the mind's speed, the tonal and rhythmic rightness (as in Delights of Winter at the Shore). Why in the fiction is there a need for discursive qualification, thoughts and afterthoughts, talk-talk-talk, an author's bland intrusion? (pp. 355-56)