Philip Whalen's first novel [You Didn't Even Try], belying his title, shows that a fair life inside an American family—a series of related families, in this case—is more or less possible so long as you do not rely on the family for every source of nourishment, or as one more substitute for warfare. Mr. Whalen is well known as a San Francisco poet, expert at carefully controlled and highly original poetic forms for private experience. His novel has little of his customary experimentation and in that sense may be disappointing to readers of his poems. It concerns what happens to beat and intellectual attitudes when Philip Whalen 1923– Photograph by Barbara Lubanskitheir owner-occupiers grow middle-aged. The hero's wife, Helen, is a centre of malcontented energy, a Fury of the monogamous system whose ability as an art-historian has petered out and left her with one full-time occupation...