SOURCE: "A Perverse Fiction," in The Kenyon Review, Vol. XX, No. 1, Winter, 1958, pp. 140-44.

Stern is an educator, critic, novelist, and short story writer whose books include Golk (1960) and Collected Stories (1988). In the following unfavorable review of By Love Possessed, Stern faults the novel's structure, literary style, and character development.

The form of James Cozzens' latest novel is that of The Ambassadors: the book is organized around a central consciousness, an intelligent, middle-aged man who participates more or less directly in actions the evaluation of which leads to revaluation of his own experience and principles. A fine pattern for a novel, and one which Cozzens has successfully followed—though not so strictly—in Men and Brethren (1936), Ask Me Tomorrow (1940), and The Just and the Unjust (1942). Unfortunately, the structural principle of By Love Possessed is seriously flawed, and its materials are shoddy. The central intelligence, Arthur Winner Jr., the...