Alan Broughton does not hesitate to treat subjects that have been treated before, but he does it so well [in A Family Gathering] that one cannot hold it against him. Not since Catcher in the Rye have we had such a perceptive study of a young boy's coming of age. After Holden Caulfield, Lawson Wright, and Lawson does not suffer from the comparison. One regrets that the two other principal characters, Bailey and Jacqueline, are comparatively dim. The author clearly wishes these two, the parents, to stand on their own, but it would have been a better book if we had seen them only through Lawson's eyes. When this has been said, there is nothing left but praise for a very absorbing first novel. There is a marvelous description of a country wedding that must surely take a place among the classics of its kind. Altogether a novel...