Word: rosten
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...witness such recent novels as: Captain Newman, M.D., by Leo Rosten, Faces in the Water, by Janet Frame, and Lilith, by J. R. Salamanca...
...Rosten has published a novel. Its hero is a World War II Air Corps doctor whose name is Newman and, according to one of his peers, "he acts as if it were Newton." Or perhaps just N*E*W*M*A*N. At any rate, he is brilliant, engaging, confident, commanding, twice the size of life, and certainly the most revved-up psychiatrist who ever helped a patient recover from the terrors of the wild blue yonder...
Apparently intending these adornments to offset his central theme and prove that life has at least two sides, Author Rosten has ended up with a novel that suffers from cute appendicitis. Captain Newman, M.D. is really two books, intertwined like medicine's caduceus, at its best considerably better than The Snake Pit, at its worst a fun-house chortle hollowly echoing See Here, Private Hargrove...
...pilot ditched the plane, the ball turret was knocked off, the gunner somehow survived, but his mind was gone. Receiving these cases back in Ward 7, generally knowing little more about them than their names, ranks and serial numbers, Captain Newman approaches them with godly insight, and somehow Rosten manages to suggest with plausibility that his psychiatric hero is three-quarters Mr. Roberts and one-quarter Nostradamus...
Cute Appendicitis. Unfortunately, Rosten alternates his serious chapters with scenes of pure situation comedy, belabored with literary vaudeville. The contrast with the scenes of death and suffering is ludicrous. A story that ends in suicide, for example, is immediately followed by one in which half the officers on the post, full of booze, jump into the officers' club pool in pursuit of a flock of ducks. In another episode, sheep get loose on the main runway when a plane carrying the Under Secretary of War for Air is about to land. There is a private from Alabama who thinks...