Case History, No. 2

THE FALL OF VALOR (310 pp.)--Charles Jackson--Rinehart ($2.75).

Charles Jackson's first novel, The Lost Weekend, was the story of five days in the life of a lost soul, Don Birnam, a confirmed and hopeless alcoholic unable to save himself or see any way to be saved. It was a study in acknowledged disorder. The Fall of Valor, Jackson's second book, is a study in the revelation of disorder. The story follows a conventionally successful man, John Grandin, through the crucial weeks of his life, when his long-growing sense that something is wrong gives way to the shock of realizing that he is a homosexual.

In choosing this theme Author Jackson has ruled out the chance of any such popular success as he had with his first novel. It is not a theme that even the brashest of moviemakers will rush to handle, and readers who found Don Birnam a sympathetic figure are not likely to have any such fellow feeling for John Grandin. Many readers who got a wallop out of Weekend will have to judge Valor on its literary merit alone, and they will find it medium-to-poor.

Grandin and his wife have been married ten years and have two children. He is aware--but not half so aware as she is--that he has given his wife only perfunctory attention for some time, preoccupied as he is with his work as a teacher and scholarly writer. They look forward to their vacation with quite different intentions: he to make up for his neglect, she to force a showdown about it. The showdown takes a form neither had expected when Grandin falls in love with a handsome Marine captain.

Author Jackson has a plausible clinical grasp of the excruciating predicament of these people, and he prepares his revelation with conscientious care. But the book is not remotely comparable to Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, a calm, classic, immensely artful treatment of a similar theme.

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