Word: jed
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...with selfhood and alienation. His protagonist literally revels in his aloneness, his rootlessness, his inability to love. Nor is he content with a mere demonstration of his problems; instead, he explains them to us, over and over again, in a style that mixes the lofty literary references of academic--Jed is a medievalist at the University of Chicago--with Faulknerian neologisms and strings of appositives...
...novel's main failings. Dialogue and action often take a back seat to first-person narration in contemporary fiction; still, when the narrator's chief preoccupation is his own lack of selfhood, the novelist faces an imposing task. In this case, he succeeds only in order to fail. Evoking Jed's self-confessed insubstantiality by equipping him with poetic phrases and intellectual rationalizations in place of emotions, Warren purposely forfeits the possibility of making his protagonist a fully rounded, artistically engaging human being. Jed is a small triumph of characterization, but a pyrrhic one nonetheless...
...MAGIC of Warren's language creates a web of images more vivid than the characters they describe. What one remembers from Warren's novel is first of all a series of word-pictures--of Jed's mistress tapping her sandal hypnotically in the glow of the firelight, of his wife, dying of cancer, lifting up her bony hand to him in pain and entreaty, of Jed himself holding a gun to the head of a German officer sneering "Heil Hitler!" The lingering force of these images is linked to the mode of narration; Jed tells his story--an odyssey which...
Beginning with the half-comic death of his father, in the act of urinating, and ending with his mother's death almost half a century later, Jed milks his memory for fragments of meaning. The narrative proceeds chronologically, skimming rapidly over Jed's academic career, slowing down to capture the degeneration of his love affair, and focusing finally and most persistently on his moments of existential angst. Jed's own formlessness is thrown into relief by his encounters with a cluster of well-drawn minor figures, from the cheerfully mundane Cudworths, whose very name suggests the unquestioning content of cattle...
Warren's depictions of major characters are less exact, particularly in the case of Jed's mistress, Rose (nee Rozelle) Carrington. Rose exists only as Jed imagines her-a compound of firelight and sweating sexuality. She is a medley of images, of bare feet and huddled fur and surrender. But, like Jed, for whom she ironically represents a form of ultimate reality, she is less a character than a poetic creation--evoked, but in the end, not completely present...