Tender Mercy

If you are an Englishman you will begin by being irritated by Mr. Kaufman?I almost wrote " by having Mr. Kaufman irritate you "?such is the obtrusiveness of the American idiom when the title page has given you no inkling Mr. Kaufman is not London based. But this mere pettifog that carps. The main irritation is the slow build-up of the tale. Mr. Kaufman is in no mood to jag his backcloth with eye-catching splashes of paint. He seems to be missing his chances : situations loom but don't develop. The first eighty pages puts you in possession of every circumstance and every character trait necessary for the exquisite appreciation of the last 160. If you reach this point, where forces join battle, you will forgive everything to an author who marshals sentences, like forces, and spares words with the economy a strategist applies to men. Each of those later chapters ends on a thrust as crisply cut as the page you have to turn.