The Love Eaters almost accomplishes [the creation of its own world]. Miss Mary Lee Settle's first novel examines the loveless roots of the small American town of Canona, and in the process creates a microcosm…. It is a patterned small world, filled out and completed by doctor, lawyer, librarian, nurse, college boy—a world which, symbolically, centres on the amateur theatre of the Canona Thespians.
Miss Lee Settle measures and follows out the impact upon Canona produced by Selby Dodd and another stranger, Hamilton Sacks, the first professional director of the Canona Thespians. Hamilton Sacks is a cripple, cut off from love by his deformity, who puts in its place a faultlessly malicious sense of weakness and unhappiness in others. Selby has a complementary deformity, that of living for the love which he attracts and exploits and is unable to return. Hamilton and Selby understand one another, and each of them finds scope for full play in Canona. Miss Lee Settle's book is uncomfortably alive with the antipathies of small-town American society, which she analyses in the vigorous and rhythmic idiom of American speech, and, although this writer is a relentless analyst, the effect she achieves is a compassionate one.
"Personal Relations: 'The Love Eaters'," in The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1954; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), No. 2729, May 21, 1954, p. 325.
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