THE CANYON

by Peter Viertel '4. Harcourt, Brace, 1940. 288 pp. $2.50.

PETER VIERTEL was at Dartmouth only a semester—he remembered his canyon in the hills of Santa Monica. His novel tells the story of a boy's growing up in the canyon, and of "the breaking-down process that comes to every shielded place." The shielded place is the canyon and the childhood of the boy; it also becomes your own peculiar hide-out for living memories, and that is what makes this a good book.

George's story is the story of anybody's uprooting, only it is fresh and not recounted through the pleasant haze of successful years which leave some writers thinking that childhood was only difficult when you went to dancing school without your white gloves. In this book a boy is shot through the leg, another nearly drowns, there is some drunkenness and family quarrels that sound familiar, and the discovery of sex is natural and skips the pigtail-pulling.

George's friends, the girl he loves and the canyon all change with his growing up: "The canyon as I knew it doesn't exist any more, for they have cut down so many of the large trees, and the creek that ran down to the sea among them is filled in." George has to go east to college, and when he lies in bed his memory catches him back, "but—that doesn't matter. It's silly to mention it again. The thing to do is not to think about it."

That's only toughness, though: the toughness mixed with the simplicity, the lack of sentimentality, and the occasional beauty that mark "The Canyon" a fine first novel.