My Year of Reading Vintage Novels / Vintage Mystery Books - Issue #3 - The Last Adam - James Gould Cozzens

The Last Adam - James Gould Cozzens

The Last Adam is about a small town in Connecticut as seen through the eyes of all its inhabitants, though chiefly through the eyes of the town doctor. To quote Kirkus Reviews "The central character is the country doctor, not the usual glorified, sentimentalized figure, but a rather surprisingly shoddy and at the same time appealing human being."

The major story line in The Last Adam concerns a typhoid epidemic that sweeps through the town. The epidemic is caused by unsanitary conditions in a workers camp. The workers have come to the town to erect steel towers and hang overhead power lines. The electric company is bringing progress to the town. The irony is that progress causes the outbreak of a disease only the doctor's elderly aunt can remember. Other major themes in this books include not only change and progress, but rich vs poor and "modern medicine".

Cozzens' writing can be positively lyrical at times as in this passage that describes a sunset and the cold weather: "It was perfectly light still, a sunless lucid light with no direct source. The sky was a hard northern blue; sun itself shone a bright sad orange on the crest of the cobble. Increasing cold could be guessed from an elusive, fragile clarity of air in the valley shadows."

Please don't miss this good book by another once well regarded and now largely forgotten author. I am looking forward to reading another of his books, a court room drama titled The Just and the Unjust, later this year.