(3 of 3)
THE HANDS OF ESAU, by Hiram Haydn (784 pp.; Harper; $7.50). It is the summer of a middle year for Walton Herrick, but it seems to him the winter of his lifetime. His third wife quits him and with her go their children. What a time to be urged to run for Governor! What a time to be caught in the clash of two cliques down at the foundation! Herrick—man of both sensitivity and substance—is in a Nixonian crisis or worse, and it causes his whole life to pass before his eyes. The process requires 784 pages, a great deal of recollection-in-miniature, and a wearisome whirligig of literary techniques that makes this long novel seem all the longer.
As editor of The American Scholar and Atheneum Publishers, Author Haydn, 54, has earned a reputation for scrupulous taste and sympathetic insight. But as an author, he commits gaucheries and piles up prolixities that as an editor he should have blenched at. Perhaps it is because the book is almost embarrassingly autobiographical. And at the end, the reader learns that the book is merely the first part of an unfinished trilogy.