THE PRISM
By Jennifer Lash
Doubleday.  191 p. $3.95
 
 

         The Prism is a delicate and rather lovely book, unusual for our time in its combination of idealism and realism, unusual for any time in its atmosphere of piety and hardheadedness.  The paradoxical nature of the work makes it a trifle difficult to assess.  Though many of the attitudes are conventional, the expression of them is fresh and vivid; though there are too many characters for such a thin volume, they do manage to become essentially clear; and though the symbolism becomes paramount, the story remains plausible on the first level of meaning.

          The story of The Prism is the story of a monk, Dom Lucius Trehearne.  All the other characters are present because they reflect him or impinge on him.  He is an intellectual, with an intellectual awareness of God's existence, but no understanding of God as loving or lovable.  In some unexplained way, Lucius has won the hearts of his abbot, of a young man named Jonathan Sargent and of a married woman named Isabella Barton.  Isabella tells him of her love for him, which Lucius cannot fully appreciate or return, though he almost brings it to physical consummation.  The abbot, in spite of -- or because of -- his love, manages to give precisely the wrong answer on the two occasions when Lucius needs him.  Jonathan, too, loves the monk, but Lucius, having become humble to the point of diffidence, turns Jonathan over to an ecclesiastical Babbitt whose one attempt at counseling drives the young man to suicide.

          The novel has much of anguish in it, much of the futility and frustration of life, but all though it there runs a thread of imagery and symbolism which keeps the eternal background and man's ultimate self-vindication always in the reader's mind.  On the surface, this is one more pious novel; but its incidents are, with remarkable skill, put into a framework of the one and the many, time and eternity.  Some unreality is apparent, because Miss Lash is unaware of the psychological habits induced by life in a religious order.  Her Lucius may not be possible; but because she is a talented writer, she manages to make him credible -- in fact, quite real -- in this exquisite little novel.  Unfortunately, the type in which the book is set seems small and crowded, thought is not small enough to conceal the use of
felicitate for facilitate and illusive where apparently the word should be elusive.

                           ----------William B. Hill
 

America
Vol. 108, No. 14
Whole Number 2806
pg. 678
May 11, 1963

FICTION
Selected and Annotated
by William B. Hill

The Prism, by Jennifer Lash (Doubleday, 192p. $3.95).  This brief but sharply defined work has a rare indecisive abbot, a young married woman who fancies herself in love with the monk
 

                   -------------William B. Hill