April 1959
This is the kind of novel which could easily have been entitled ‘Bed and Bored’. It is extremely well done of its kind: neatly written, larded with snippets of pre-digested philosophy, sometimes funny, and always light in touch - about a young girl at college who goes home on vacation to find that her parents have separated, has an affair, goes back to college, her parents join up again and her young man abandons her. Crossed in love, she decides to go to Europe (this is the American contemporary equivalent to Edwardians shooting bears - one imagines that the expense is much the same, and the dangers as monotonous).
If the author (incidentally, a Mr. Warren Miller, masquerading all over the jacket as Miss Vail) is right about the very young and really he is so convincing that at any rate he’s taken me in - it isn’t just that they don’t have fun any more, they don’t have anything. They are so stuffed with information about experience that there seems no room or incentive for them to have anything direct, so that when it comes to their own lives - and they come to them reluctantly - they go sadly through the motions of whatever it is they think they know something about: their subsequent disappointment is attributed by them to their becoming adult, the moral is probably: ‘Do not take your vicarious experience so seriously my dear’, but they have no aunt to say it - ‘not even of any kind’.