Age of Inertia

Many Can Wear This Stuffed Shirt

By Don Robertson

R. V. Cassill's new novel, The President (Simon & Schuster, $4.95), begins with this fine astringent paragraph:

Major Royce Morgan came out of the Army in 1945 expecting soon to be the 12th president of Wellford College. That is to say, since the war had finally and decisively blunted his faith in the educability of the human species, he was finally ready to accept the career of an educator.

If ever an opening paragraph proclaimed the attitudes of a novel, this one does. Cassill's book is a brilliant and very funny indictment of us all. It is a judicious and artful study in inertia, stuffed-shirtism and non-commitment, and as such it should make a great many people-present company not necessarily excluded cringe.

THE NOVEL'S protagonist is Royce Morgan. He is the son of a previous president of Wellford College. He is to the manner born, fully expects to be the 12th president. But he isn't chosen. Instead, for a variety of reasons, the college picks a man named Winfred Mooney, a corrupt homosexual who also happens to be a hot-shot Madison Avenue type who is quite successful at transmogrifying the school from a college to a university. He accomplishes this by conning industrialists and foundations, moving Wellford into big-time basketball and making sure his hair is dyed snow-white. (Improves the image of a president, you know. Mr. Chipsish and all that.)

Morgan, the protagonist, is dean of the college. He understands the corrupt Mooney but does nothing. This is because Morgan is the sort of man who would rather have his life neat than eventful. He is no coward; he is simply inert.

and

THE EVENTUAL predictable-downfall of Mooney is drawn superbly by Cassill. Time and again you sort of draw back because of the felicity of the man's writing. It is no longer enough to say Cassill is talented. His two previous major novels, "Clem Anderson" and "Pretty Leslie," demonstrated that. The time has come to call him one of the very important writers of this generation.

Morgan's inertia, his relations with Mooney, with his neurotic wife, his sensitive son, his plump and hapless ex-mistress-all are very subtle and special, and they all have a feeling of rightness. This is a subtle

R. V. Cassill

and special novel. It must be there. This is a man who has read carefully. The rewards are large.

It is by far the most mannered of Cassill's novels. He has smoothed down some of the rudeness of his previous works. But the impact is still

a straight and honest and unique view of the human situation. His new novèl (not an easy book, not a superficial one) is a credit to a fine mind and a large conscience.