Far too often the homosexual has been made the clay-footed butt of stale jokes, or the recipient of barely camouflaged knife wounds, or the irrevocably tragic victim of some biopsychical joke. It is not so in this novel, and let us thank Mr. Federoff for the change of air.

The treatment of Warren reminds me of the handling of Dickie Whitfield in Maritta Wolff's novel, The Big Nickelodeon. While that work was a far cry from the masterpiece level, it did give a clear and compassionate picture of the lost lives which hover on the dusty edges of the movie industry's tinsel glories. And there, as in Mr. Federoff's work, the homosexual often seemed to be the most fully drawn and balanced individual of a large group. While Dickie knows both despair and disillusionment, he remains whole and consistent; he is one psychically lamed person who stands out in the memory of the reader far more clearly than any other in that maimed crowd. Is this merely because of his homosexuality, or does it derive from something more complex? I cannot pretend to offer any decisive answers; my own opinions are not fully formed.

For this reason it is undoubtedly premature and somewhat idiotic for me to attempt to construct a case on the foundation of these two isolated cases. But an idea, however faulty, has been developing in my mind. Is it possible that the homosexual, perhaps because of a certain innate alienation from society as a whole, is able to carry without falling the weight of our individual and collective separation from the logicality of life? In other words, is the invert, at least in contemporary fiction, more than a mere scapegoat?

It seems possible. The homosexual may, however unconscious this development may be on the part of his

fictional creator, be developing as the recipient of our collective social turmoil. His individual aloneness perhaps provides a basis for his use as a symbol of our purported social, moral, and political decay. Clues to such an interpretation do seem to exist in much recent fiction.

One need only look at the work of Sartre, De De Beauvoir, Bourjaily, Angus Wilson, Durrell, Martin Kramer, and many more, to see how often the invert has been presented, in varying degrees, as a symbol of our age of flux, our sense of severance from the "old fashioned" values. In most cases he is not the focal point of the story, but he is always there, contributing his own special brand of separation to the total picture of our apparent social rootless-

ness.

I feel sure that Mr. Federoff's honest portrayal of a developing homosexual was not intended purely as a symbol of contemporary mores, any more than the same thing could be said of any of the authors cited above. But the fact itself remains, that these writers, in a surprising number of strikingly different works of fiction, have presented the general reading public with a string of individualized homosexuals drawn with understanding and depth.

Is it, then, too unreasonable to assume that this ever growing series of portrayals is symptomatic of a need to give increased emphasis to the social commentary which is so integral a part of these novels? I do not want the reader to think that I reject the concept of the homosexual as a socioliterary scapegoat. I have no objection to his serving in this capacity if there is a logical basis for his doing so, although many readers will undoubtedly disagree with me here. Nor, however, am I completely satisfied that this is the only basis on

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