SOURCE: "Marks of Eternity," in The Commonweal, Vol. LXVII, No. 4, October 25, 1957, pp. 105-07.

An American editor and author, Finn worked for the journals Commonweal, Worldview, and Christian Century, in succession, and published several books about war and pacificism. In the following laudatory review of Lines of Life, he briefly discusses the novel's place in Mauriac' s body of work and then assesses it as a great work of art

Lines of Life, published first in France in 1928 under the title Destins, is part of the "early" Mauriac, those six or seven novels that made him a standard and symbol for young writers in the thirties. It was primarily this group of novels against which the bien pensants leveled charges of "unwholesome" and "corrupt," these novels which M. Mauriac had in mind when he wrote his brilliant apologia, God and Mammon.

Readers who approach M. Mauriac for the first...