It is about time someone “discovered” William March. True, there is a William March cult, but a man who has been writing for twelve years and has published six books that rank with the best American fiction being written should have something more than a cult and a quiet fame in the short-story anthologies. By now, March has explored his Alabama county almost as thoroughly as Faulkner has explored his Mississippi county, delved just as deeply into the recesses of the human personality, and come up with material fully as striking (if handled without Faulkner's somewhat excessive symbolism of horror).

The Looking Glass, March's fourth novel and his first since 1936, is almost impossible to summarize on the level of plot. It is concerned with the interrelated lives of the inhabitants of “Reedyville,” including at least a dozen central characters and innumerable minor ones. There is Manny Nelloha, the boy obsessed with the fear that he is a Negro, who grows up to become a doctor, deliberately murders the girl he loves through a septic abortion, and spends the rest of his life in expiation; Honey Boutwell, the oversexed white girl who achieves international fame as a “Negro” singer of blues; Minnie McInnis McMinn, the small-town journalist who becomes a whopping success as a hack writer and radio personality; Virginia Owen, the Goodwife of Death, who spends her life preparing the dead for burial as a way of sending offerings to her husband, Death; and any number of others equally exotic.

Many of these characters are familiar from the other books, and all their obsessions are. March, in the great tradition, is centrally concerned with the theme of guilt and expiation: the idea, as he expresses it in the words of the Negro spiritual that is the epigraph for his best novel, that you can't go over, under, or around the Lord, but must come in the door, the “door” of sacrificial death or destruction. His first novel, Company K, was a bitter anti-war pattern of soldiers' reminiscences, its core (later amplified and reprinted as a short story) the wanton murder of German prisoners that made the nine men who participated in it themselves forever “prisoners,” until one killed himself as Sacrificial King for them and brought the rest surcease. The next, Come in at the Door, was the study of a child who caused the death of a Negro friend and suffered lifelong tragedy until he found release in madness. March's third novel, The Tallons, was the almost classical story of a man who murdered his brother, took his brother's wife, and went inevitably through the tragic rituals of repentance, obsession, confession and execution. The two volumes of short stories, The Little Wife and Some Like Them Short, run to similar themes again and again.

In The Looking Glass, a more complex work than any of the others, March reduces this theme in scale and plays variations on it. The book's form is almost completely inchoate, as bad as Faulkner at his worst, with the story told backwards and forwards, the shifts in time and character almost haphazard, and the single small thread of continuity, a boy's attempt to borrow three dollars to pay a doctor, so trivial that it gets lost for chapters on end. What gives this seemingly formless book its high degree of organization is the imagery, which is as tight and carefully woven as a good symphony, and is impossible to do justice to within the brief space of a review. The central image of the book, the looking-glass itself, translates as “sacrificial death by immolation in ice” (as, for example, the twelve-year-old prodigy's suicide in a frozen pond), but it also partakes of such diverse characteristics as sex, blood, deformity, incest and the ultimate end of the world (a more terrible and final destruction, March says, than that by water, drought, fire or decay) and thus serves as a bridging device to unite all the scattered imagery in the book.

As in all the other books, March relies heavily on his favorite method, a kind of grisly irony that speaks out for good by flaunting evil. His stories are all magnificently turned exercises in irony, and the moral content of the novels frequently takes the form of outright parable (particularly in Come in at the Door, where a short, highly effective ironic parable is inserted after every few chapters.) What little direct social statement the books contain is either a wryly ironic-presentation of the villain's case (as in a bitter story about peonage called “Runagate Niggers”) or a cutting paradox that reverses the truth, like the comment on “passing” implicit in The Looking Glass when Honey Boutwell, the blues singer, begs a friend not to expose her as white and ruin her life.

The Looking Glass reiterates and amplifies the body of what might be called March's “philosophy,” about as depressing a set of ideas as can be imagined. March seems to believe that all men must live in loneliness and isolation, their only possible communication “lies,” but that the threads of their lives are nevertheless inseparably bound together. He tends to see all people as either mentally or psychologically deformed, and all relationships between them, particularly close family relationships, as only endless variants of sadism and masochism; hatred and answering love, murder and expiation. His books may be lower-keyed than Faulkner's, but they are quite as lively.

If there is any single clue to William March's preoccupations, it would seem to be a guilt obsession with his part in the last war. Whatever his preoccupations, he has been exorcising them on paper with consummate skill. The Looking Glass, although probably not so remarkable a novel as Come in at the Door, is remarkable enough and contains spots that are better than anything March has done before. It is a pleasure to read a writer with a knowledge of his craft and so full an awareness of the material he is manipulating. William Faulkner had better look to his laurels.