Mr. Cronin has a reputation as a "professional novelist" or a "good story-teller" and his latest book [A Thing of Beauty] has the lulling effect those terms imply. I picked it up, remembering that The Citadel had given me, at the age of fourteen, a strong desire to be a doctor and to save humanity. And I thought that intellectual fashions one adopts at a later age had, perhaps, made me unfair to writers of this kind. But I was wrong. This book is a sedative.

It purports to be the story of a great painter's life and it is no compliment to say that Mr. Cronin gets as near to depicting Genius as Henry James did in Roderick Hudson. James' first attempt, however, did have some subtlety to recommend it; Mr. Cronin's book has none. It is, first of all, one of those chronicle novels that seem...