Books: Third Novel

THE BIG CAGE (342 pp.) — Robert Lowry—Doubleday (^3).

Robert Lowry's first book, Casualty, published in 1946, was a story of stagnation in a U.S. Army camp in Italy, of sullen enlisted men, buck-passing officers, drunkenness, boredom, brief and fatal outbreaks of violence. His second, Find Me in Fire (1948), told of the return of a crippled soldier to his home town after the war, and of his inability to find a place for himself in it again. The Wolf That Fed Us, published earlier this year, was a collection of eight war stories, which had the spare narrative, the graphic power...