Three Soldiers, Back From the War . . .

This is distinctly not The Story Of The Veteran. Although it treats of the uneasy sequence of strivings and debauchery which crowded the first November to February of three young men back from V-E Day these are not three representative ex-GI's. They and those with whom they travel in "That Winter" form a kaleidoscopic composite of author Miller and his friends: cosmopolites who are individualistic enough but possessing in common overriding sensitivity. It is such sensitivity which completely separates them and their war rebound from "average" veterans. Despite what some have said about its outdoing of Fitzgerald and its spokesmanship for a new Lost Generation the work must rather stand or fall as a specialized sort of chronicle.

In its own right "That Winter" makes for absorbing reading, jumping from sections of tremendous flavor to impressions and episodes often mediocre. The plot centers upon Peter (his surname never appears) and his two fellow-careerist apartment-mates n Manhattan. Ted lost his arm overseas; shorn of idealism and faith, overwhelmed with wealth that is the one ingredient he needs least for happiness, he ultimately ends his life. Lew Cole has changed his Jewish name for the sake of armament in the competitive world of radio. Peter himself fights the false enticements of The Newsmagazine where he sells his soul for handsome office trappings and scampering office boys. Through the lives of these three and the circle around them runs a pattern of restlessness and failure to find self, high searching morality and low lust. Miller has written a novel that is good because it isolates and preserves for time ahead the tenor and taste of a certain significant period's play on some significant people. It verges toward the second-rate when it tackles large issues and attempts a sweep of which it is apparently incapable.

High spots in "That Winter" come each time the author draws from his exclusive personal experience. Both The Managing Editor of The Newsmagazine, for whom Miller once ground out crisp copy, and one Jonathan Lee, wealthy sponsor of a "think" journal called Thought, spring from actual life parallels in pretty ruthless prose. On his trip to the hometown of Hadley, Iowa (Miller grow up in a small Iowa town) for his father's funeral Peter's sensations of contrast between Big City excitement and small-town torpor have real force. The resurrections of his high-school love affair and the interlude with the Hadley Republican feature writer, a "promising" young lady journalist in her and Peter's bygone teens, catch the bittersweet of memory spanning adolescence-to-thirty.

Departing from limited episode and straining to integrate military experiences with civilian moments reminiscent of them, Miller achieves less effective results. The totality of meaning which is his obvious design simply does not come off; but in the separate incidents employed there are still personality creations packing enough wallop within themselves to negate their failure in terms of the whole effort. During a nightmare of battle, for example, Peter gains enduring respect for the unique integrity of Gene Wenisloski--an emotional attachment extending beyond Wenisloski's death under fire. And Peter's brief stop in Chicago to look up Harry Myers, renegade Communist turned boy's settlement leader, burns with a quality which had it been transposed into a consistent thread for the entire novel would have spelled far greater stature.