Not all the mistakes of America can be blamed on the State Department. Some are collective immoralities, such as the discrepancy between our pretensions as a land of refuge and our actual, eyedropper admission of refugees. Our quotas have been steadily reduced ever since Hitler came to power, in exact proportion as the need grew….

This, oddly enough, is the main theme of a first novel ["The Trespassers"] which includes a love story, a description of Freud's farewell meeting with the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and the case history of Jasper Crown, high-powered owner of a radio network, whose brutal drive toward success is motivated by fear of his own sexual sterility.

The novel, overburdened with symbolism, rocks between two parallel themes of rejection. "The Trespassers" on the earth, rejected by their own country and unwanted, apparently, by any other, are here represented by a Viennese psychoanalyst and his...