Senior Spring

C.G. Lumbard's Senior Spring is a novel with one saving grace: its ability to treat with considerable maturity that sorely bandied subject, young love. Its plot and all but one of its characters are ill-defined; its attempt to paint the everyday life of a far-western college fraternity is far from satisfying; and sometimes the writing approaches the abysmal. Yet because of its single redeeming feature, it is an interesting and promising first novel.

Back in the twenties, a young author named Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise, which although no great literary masterpiece, established for him the title of laureate of the Jazz Age. If C.G. Lumbard is consciously trying to emulate Fitzgerald--though I doubt that he is--he has realized that the Atom requires a somewhat different treatment from Jazz. Yet there are a number of similarities in the men themselves; both young and trying to write of their own age group, both attempting to relate themselves to current trends and to affect an insight which they could not have.

Like many of Fitzgerald's collegiate characters, Steve Burnett, the hero of Senior Spring, ranges from boorishness to sophistication. But author Lumbard fails to justify Burentt's varying attitudes. If Lumbard meant to convey the restlessness of the period, he is not consistent in that attempt, and if he meant to give him any outstanding quality, it is lost in a maze of contradiction. Only with Cassy Kane does he achieve any greatness as a character. In a love affair marred by the shadow of a past abortion, and the grim truth of a present one, there is still the remoteness, the almost dreamy atmosphere so reminiscent of the best of Fitzgerald.

Some occasional inadequacies in the narrative veil the good writing that appears sporadically in the descriptive passages. Though these faults keep Senior Spring from being an important novel, some of the book's moderate virtues hint at better things to come.