Word: morton
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...longest piece is the first chapter of a novel called "Steven Morton." Sy Heifitz, the author, skillfully develops an interesting character albeit that most of the developments take place in bed. Through a series of failures that culminate in his imprisonment for being a conscientious objector, Steven Morton evolves as a tragic introvert, frail of body, afraid of intimacy. Simple touches make the story effective: two lovers whispering in the kitchen after a date, so as not to wake up the parents; the uneasy triteness of their conversation due to their fear of saying what they really feel. Heifitz tells...
...book is weakened by two excessive demands Mr. Morton makes on the reader's credulity. One is that we believe Iris really did all the things she says she did during the five days which the novel corers. In that time, she is almost seduced at Saratoga, plans to be seduced in a dingy New York hotel, and is finally deflowered at a New Jersey resort camp. She also manages to graduate, go job-hunting, visit a German theatre and an employment agency for destitute German-Americans, have several vigorous spats with her family, and plan a series of articles...
...other demand is that we accept the first-person narrative as being the heroine's actual stream of consciousness. Mr. Morton has a naturally florid style, and his exploitation of the descriptive powers of the English language leads him into a gaudiness of analogy and description which is especially ill-adapted to hectic first-person narration. ("It was a terrifying thing, a pale apple-green cloud, like a carbuncle in the anthracite...
...doubly great pity that Mr. Morton chose the "I" technique, since his forte is description of other people. When he steps out of Iris for a moment to watch the goings-on in her West Bronx apartment, he introduces a menagerie of characters who are far more interesting and believable than his heroine. The straight description of her amazing Cornell sophomore brother is much more effective, for instance, than Iris' impressions of one of here amours: "And he still looked at me with all his immense naive vibrating thereness, and all my insides goose-pimpled as at something strange, impossible...
...last novel, "The Darkness Below," Mr. Morton has dealt with an important and fertile topic, this time with the insecurity accompanying loss or rejection of values or allegiances. But, as in the earlier work, he has drawn attention away from the first-person, with whom he is presumably concerned, by his superior handling of objective narrative. Nevertheless "Asphalt and Desire" remains a stimulating commentary on the tribulations of a girls whose ambitions, nurtured by college life, outrun the realities of her social position...