F E B R U A R Y  1 9 4 8

Lionel Trilling's The Middle of the Journey (Viking, $3.00) is a searching account of the liberal's dilemma of conscience in a world surrendering to extremes of dogma, an important first novel by a distinguished critic. The chief protagonists are John Laskell -- the liberal "in the middle of the journey" -- convalescing after a dangerous (obviously symbolic) illness; his old friends the Crooms, an amiable couple whose politics reflect the "party line"; and Gifford Maxim, an ex-revolutionary converted to a new orthodoxy.

Mr. Trilling unfolds his theme in delicate shading of behavior as much as in direct argument. The disjointed and seemingly irrelevant action -- a blind mating of two bodies, the death of a child, a fight -- subtly clarifies the conflict of ideas. The final explosion brings home to Laskell that the Crooms' "liberalism" is a savage fanaticism and Maxim's self-immolation in dogma, first of party then of creed, is his refuge from a haunting sense of guilt. To the Crooms' denial of responsibility and Maxim's denial of conditioning, Laskell opposes "the human being in maturity, at once responsible and conditioned," the critical intelligence constantly in modulation. Laskell recognizes that his type of liberalism is in eclipse, but he will not become a renegade or an iconoclast or even a disgruntled man. Mr. Trilling has sounded a new note of dissent, a more realistic and mature one than the frantic reformism of the thirties and the sterile disillusionment of the twenties.