SOURCE: "Good Fathers and Good Sons," in Saturday Review, April 29, 1967, pp. 25-6.

In the following review, Hicks offers praise for The Chosen, which he describes as "a fine, moving, gratifying book."

The impression one gets from most contemporary fiction is that youth today is both disturbed and disturbing. Everyone knows about J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield, who, with the best of intentions, gets into one mess after another. But Holden's troubles are nothing compared to the difficulties of other young people we read about. Wright Morris's Jubal Gainer whirls away on his (stolen) motorcycle from crime to crime. John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom runs and runs. The college students in John Nichols's The Sterile Cuckoo major in alcohol and sex, but they are tame in comparison with the undergraduates in the late Richard Farina's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. John Hersey, in Too Far...