Books: Sad to Be Mad

THE FUGITIVES (260 pp.)—Robert Gutwillig—Little, Brown ($3.75).

Much modern fiction seems to have been written as part of a campaign to stamp out mental health, and this deceptively jaunty novel heightens the impression by setting much of its narrative in a madhouse. The Haven is no snakepit but a kind of Gothic prep school for a world into which the inmates hope never to graduate. (The reader, incidentally, knows it is a madhouse because the Princeton man running round the Christmas tree is wearing a boater with orange-and-black band, but nothing else.)

In After Long Silence (TIME, May 19), talented young U.S....