A STAR CALLED WORMWOOD (250 pp ) — Martha Bacon—Random House ($2.75).
The American innocent all abroad in Europe’s worldliness has been a favorite theme of novelists. It is a handy device for making subtle discriminations between the morals & manners of different worlds
In her first novel, Martha Bacon has given this theme a modern twist. While Henry James sometimes saw American innocence as a fresh and gracious stimulant to overcultivated Europe, kiss Bacon deals with a situation in which the irresponsibility of Americans causes a tragedy for Europeans.
She tells the story of an American family living in Italy. David Meredith is a writer whose books sparkle but lack proportion; his children, left to grow wild like unclipped weeds, are something like his books. There is Frances, an intense, mixed-up young girl; Louis, who flirts with Fascism out of boredom and an ignorance of life that parades as cynicism. Even four-year-old Leonora is spoiled.
One day, as a result of a lark, the children and their tutor find themselves lost in the mountains, penniless and hungry. They stumble through the parched and worn country; they are chased out of the estate of a decrepit Fascist nobleman; and they are finally held captive by an anti-Fascist fugitive, Renato Spinelli, who fears that they would unwittingly betray him if he let them go. The haggard Spinelli plans a heroic public death for himself, since he knows that he cannot escape. But Frances falls in love with him and persuades him to try to escape with her, only to involve them both in disaster.
Miss Bacon’s implication seems to be that Frances and the other Merediths have cheated Spinelli out of the one gesture that might have lent dignity to his life; and that when the innocence of people like the Merediths is compounded with irresponsibility it becomes the equivalent of guilt.
These implications are capably handled by Miss Bacon, but they are often too heavy a burden for the frail frame of her novel. Still, as a first novel, A Star Called Wormwood is a notable performance.
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