Word: jeane
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Answers. Novelist Martin du Gard, despite his real stature, has not attracted the audience he deserves, is still all but unknown in this country. The Thibaults, considered a modern classic in France, has had no great sale in the U.S. and Jean Barois, published here for the first time, may sell no better. Nonetheless, it is one of the most original novels, in theme and technique, to reach U.S. readers this year...
...Jean Barois is the story of a young Roman Catholic intellectual who breaks with church and family, becomes a freethinker, wins a reputation as a progressive by pleading the cause of Dreyfus. Gradually (after his carriage accident) he becomes dissatisfied with materialist answers to matters of life & death, and in the end returns to the fold...
...name of the character, followed by a word or two indicating his manner. Explanatory passages are short. Such methods will annoy some readers, who will feel that they are not getting a book, but only the outline of one. In a sense, they will be right. The style of Jean Barois is only the skeleton of the method Martin du Gard fleshed out in The Thibaults, but it is made of good solid bones...
...Publicity. Martin du Gard began Jean Barois at 29, finished it three years later. After World War I, in which he had charge of an army truck corps, Martin du Gard conceived the idea of The Thibaults and reorganized his life to write it according to plan. The plan worked equally well on his country estate in Normandy or at his apartment in Nice. On Monday mornings he would disappear into his workroom; seldom reappear until Friday night...
Still the studious observer of the dilemmas of life, the author of Jean Barois intends to remain true to his own modest self-definition: "An independent writer who . . . escaped the fascination of partisan ideologies, an investigator as objective as is humanly possible, as well as a novelist striving to express the tragic quality of individual lives...