Abstract

Incurable Intelligence

The book "Crazy Man," by Maxwell Bodenheim, is a novel of breadth and distinction that makes the reviewer pause before he begins to wave aloft the usual adjectives that serve as traffic signals on the literary highroad. It is the author's seventh book and with its publication he seems to rise like one of peaks that dominate the plain in the American scene. It is, broadly speaking, realistic-at least the reviewer may be pardoned for designating it so, after beholding a flying wedge of bouncers in a cheap New York dance hail converge upon a lame duck and throw him downstairs. But the lame duck disseminates a doctrine of non-resistance in the most romantic manner and now and then the author contributes such unrealistic bits as the kiss was belief, seeking to be full born against his skin, something that reads like an entry out of a diary that might have been kept by Richard Feverel in his trysting days.