The Advocate

The Advocate does official penance for its December copy on page three of its current issue, but readers will be much more inclined to forgive and forget after reading through the rest of the magazine. Except for a few weak spots, the quality of the material shows that there is some excellent original writing going on at Harvard, vard.

James Chace contributes the most polished work--another excerpt from his novel, "The Age of Michael." He spreads before the reader the thoughts of a perceptive, sensitive young boy, contrasting his shock and loneliness at the death of a beloved aunt with his uneasiness during the empty social proprieties of her funeral and his sense of disgust at the bickering over her will. Chace's beautifully proportioned prose flows smoothly, at times almost rhythmically. He seems most at home describing nature. In the scene where young Michael sneaks out the door of the cemetery chapel, the lingering description of the countryside is like a breath of fresh air.

The longest piece is the first chapter of a novel called "Steven Morton." Sy Heifitz, the author, skillfully develops an interesting character albeit that most of the developments take place in bed. Through a series of failures that culminate in his imprisonment for being a conscientious objector, Steven Morton evolves as a tragic introvert, frail of body, afraid of intimacy. Simple touches make the story effective: two lovers whispering in the kitchen after a date, so as not to wake up the parents; the uneasy triteness of their conversation due to their fear of saying what they really feel. Heifitz tells his story in a complicated series of flashbacks, and the transitions between them are not at all clear. As a result, the story spurts rather than flows, and abrupt climaxes leave the reader confused.

In "Juke Box," John Harvey has drawn on recollections of his stay in Alaska to paint some intriguing characters killing time in a quick-lunch room. But Harvey never really ekes a story out of it. Even one of the most interesting characters, a drunk named Bearpaw, whose hands are just fleshy stumps, never gets into the plot. The author leaves him outside the lunchroom, pounding in the window to get in. Quotation marks, used in other stories, would have helped "Juke Box" a great deal.

Two of the three poems suffer from the traditional esoterism of Advocate verse. The stark emotion George Kelly tries to get across in "Lament" bogs down in stilted verbiage, and Robert Layzer's "Absence" so snares itself in its own vague analogies that it drifts into incomprehensibility. "Southwest," by Charles Neuhauser, is better, particularly for the crisp language used to describe a desert tourist town.

Walter Kaiser tops the book reviewers in this issue with his criticism of Cedric Whitman's interpretation of Sophocles' plays. The review is good, straight-forward stuff, a great improvement over Kaiser's "susurrus of hosannahs" days of last Spring. Lewis Begley's review of a collection of poetry essays by Wallace Stevens is good criticism but tedious reading.