Race Rock

This is a novel about a long weekend in the lives of four peculiarly unattractive young people. The time is October 1952. The place is Shipman's Crossing, a New England fishing village which might be in Maine. The action is not confined to the present, but twists and turns through the protagonists' pasts in a series of wonderfully intricate flashbacks. The theme is the wasteland of "callow amorality" in which people are doomed to wander if they do not achieve a sense of responsibility toward themselves and others. Unfortunately, Mr. Matthiessen makes his theme clear only in his last twenty pages. And this is rather late for the reformation of two of his four principal characters to seem convincing--coming after 286 pages in which their flabby weaknesses, their shallow, superficial, self-pitying minds, and their drunken binges and general denial of purpose, effort and responsibility have been made repulsively convincing. (NYTimes)