Word: balchin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...FALL OF A SPARROW (309 pp.)-Nigel Balchin-Rinehart...
...lent him by a friend. As the book's narrator blurts, straight off: "What I want is some understanding of why it all happened-why an otherwise honorable man should suddenly act like a criminal and a cad." In a booklong flashback British Novelist Nigel (Mine Own Executioner) Balchin attempts just that, providing a prime example of that literary love child of Freud, the "why-he-dunnit...
Jason, despite this psychiatric documentation, is a likable and lively character, the book a pleasant and intimate chronicle of prewar and through-war living. Balchin, one of the most skilled of Britain's popular storytellers, has a fine, spare ear for the speech and the manners of that kind of Englishman who can accuse one another of cowardice, dishonesty or moral turpitude without raising their voices, missing a mouthful of lunch, or disturbing the even tenor of their friendship...
...necktie without illustrating "conspicuous consumption,'' or to fall in love without serving as a comment on "bourgeois morality." But in recent years, the businessman has been emerging as a human and something of a hero. The trend seems transatlantic. In the past year Britain's Nigel Balchin published Private Interests and in 1952 the U.S.'s Cameron Hawley contributed Executive Suite. Fresh bows to the businessman are now made by Britain's Socialist Novelist J. B. Priestley in The Magicians and the U.S.'s Republican Novelist Howard Swiggett in The Power and the Prize...