Like Ben Piazza, who three years ago wrote a moving first novel about boyhood called The Exact and Very Strange Truth, Timothy Findley is an actor. Again like Piazza, he is interested in boyhood and its relationship to the adult world, and he has an actor's ear for dialogue, an actor's eye for scenes. After three years, scenes from the earlier book remain vivid in the mind; it is probable that those created by Mr. Findley [in The Last of the Crazy People] will also linger for a long time, if less happily.

The first scene sets the mood, and almost—but not quite—tells us what is to happen. It is early September, after a rainless summer. An eleven-year-old boy carrying a box tiptoes out of his house in the dawn, crosses the back yard to the stable, climbs into the loft, and settles down in the straw by the half-open bale door overlooking the back of the house. The box is beside him, and so is his cat, Little Bones, whose "deadly, vibrant, yet clouded" eyes resemble his own. Together they wait and are still.

We gather from every careful word of this prologue that the boy is insane and about to do something terrible. The rest of the book, flashing back to the beginning of that hot Canadian summer, tells us of the events that have led inexorably to this September morning and of the people who contributed to them. And as we come to know the members of young Hooker Winslow's family and the middle-class community in which they exist, we begin to see that his inevitable tragedy is triggered not by one cause but by many, stress upon stress. (p. 36)

Only Iris, the Negro maid, takes any interest in the lonely boy or the pet cats who are his sole companions. But … not even Iris, with all her good will, can answer Hooker's inchoate questions; nor is there any help, he finds, in the bewildering adult world outside. "In all houses, all families, was it true that no one really loved?" Hooker wonders near the end. It is no surprise that his final act seems like ultimate sanity.

The Last of the Crazy People is not light summer reading. But it says something important, and says it with both craftsmanship and compassion. (p. 37)

Margaret Parton, "A Sad Song of Eleven Summers," in Saturday Review (© 1967 Saturday Review Magazine Co.; reprinted by permission), Vol. L. No. 31, August 5, 1967, pp. 36-7.