August 1961
Some novelists write about ordinary and general circumstances and rely upon their characters’ reactions to provide the extraordinary element; there are others who create extraordinary circumstances in order to expose general - or universal - reactions and emotions. This singular, brilliant, confounding little novel is of the second kind, and before I start upon its matter, I must say that it is written with astonishing simplicity and force, and the result is both direct and fastidiously discriminating.
An American boy, fifteen when the book opens, is ‘adopted’ by a very rich couple called Bill and Mary, and with them lives a life of dazzling sophistication and opulence. He is narcissistic, cynical, precocious, highly intelligent, with a cold heart and a restless mind, and he makes the most of the situation afforded him. Then Bill asks him to go to Europe - without Mary - whom they leave in New York. Bill is dying of cancer, and Hector finds himself inexorably drawn into responsibilities which cannot be handled at all without emotion, and where the emotion required is painfully mature. They spend a winter in Paris, and Hector arrives through love to some understanding of the man he is waiting to lose. When it is over, he returns to America and sends himself back to school. On the face of it, this is not a pretty story: the rich, heavy, hard-drinking, rather dull man who has made good and doesn’t know what to do with it, and the sharp little playboy, sexually and materially on the make, bound together by disease and death. The author has loaded all the dice against himself and then transformed these people by making them make a mutual and moving discovery of their essential natures. It is an inversion of the way Mr. Maugham goes about people, where underneath the conventionally ‘nice’ exterior often lies a seething mass of ulterior motive: here it is underneath the unattractive exterior of these two men that one is shown the reality which is the charming truth about them. This novel is certainly caviar to the general - many people may dislike it. But some, I think, will welcome a new and remarkable talent, and certainly if one gets the chance of a little caviar, it is madness not to try it.