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.

My Year of Reading Just Vintage Novels and Vintage Mystery Books - 2014 - Issue #2

The Dark Wood - (period book club edition)

Photo of author Christine Weston

I recently completed The Dark Wood by Christine Weston originally published in 1946 by Scribner's. The story centers upon three people who lives intersect during one summer in NYC. First, we are introduced to Regan and Mark Bycroft. Mark is a returning WWII veteran who comes back to find that his wife wants a divorce because she has fallen in love with someone else.

Next, the reader encounters Stella Harmon, a war widow who can not get over the loss of her husband Alec. Depressed and listless, she can hardly makes an effort to get through the day. She's been a widow for two years now.

One day she encounters Mark sitting in a bar and is shocked by the physical resemblance between him and her dead husband. Her friend Miriam also sees the resemblance but not as strongly.

Here is how Weston describes one of Mark and Stella's early meetings: "She met his gaze, and to Mark it seemed as is she were perilously near to committing herself, and to him, to further responsibilities. In another mood, with another woman, he might have welcomed the danger out of sheer loneliness, but while this woman attracted him, she strangely repelled him. His feeling towards her were not whole feelings, and passion for her died almost at the moment of inspiration."

The lives of Stella and Mark now begin to intertwine and eventually they start a relationship. Of course all is not smooth sailing. Mark does not want Stella and her friends to see / treat him as some carbon copy of her deceased husband. Does she really love him or is he just a stand in for Alec?

Weston weaves together the characters' inner thoughts with dialogue and description in a seamless and non-obtrusive way. You get to know their inner thoughts and feelings but only as it relates to the plot. The Dark Wood is not a stream of consciousness novel! Reviewers of the day classified it as a psychological novel. I agree and would simply say it's a very good read.