Irving conceived a novel that would combine the horrors of World War II with the far gentler troubles of a youth stumbling into self-awareness and manhood. Setting Free the Bears is the result, and it represents a puzzling, often astonishing literary début.

The puzzling—and completely unresolved—aspect of the book is its lack of identity with either the Jamesian tradition or the American mainstream of the 1960s. Setting Free the Bears simply isn't a contemporary American novel; the language could almost be a European translation from an original by a European writer.

There are no Americans in the book at all, and the few references to racial troubles in the United States, obviously drawn in as parallels to the inhumanity of the war, seem curiously out of place. The tone of the novel, in short, is determinedly consistent with its setting—Vienna and the Austrian countryside...