[In "The Troubled Air", his] brisk, journalistic second novel, Irwin Shaw describes the plight of a politically liberal radio director who finds himself embroiled in a purge of Communists and fellow-travelers touched off by a super-patriotic magazine. With impressive circumstantiality he demonstrates what a great many people have been suspecting for some time: that radicalism is no longer fashionable on the air waves and can, as a matter of fact, spin careers downward to economic ruin and suicide. The story has the tantalizing suggestiveness of a roman à clef and in its breathless argumentation can well serve as an index to the political anxieties of our time, but the speechmaking is easy and tedious, after all, and Shaw's rather arbitrary handling of motives makes "The Troubled Air" something less than a literary achievement. (p. 592)
That the political novel is difficult to shape has been the discovery of many writers since 1945. There is always the danger of oversimplifying human desire and of losing the thickness of actual experience. Few people are primarily politicians, the cold war notwithstanding. Shaw is aware of the problem, of course, and meets it by introducing such subsidiary themes as the pregnancy of Archer's wife and the sexual awakening of his teen-age daughter. But since the fusion is incomplete, the secondary elements seem irrelevant, posing still another problem. So exacting is the form of the political novel that for successful examples one must still turn to Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Malraux. (p. 593)
Stephen Stepanchev, "Shaw's Political Novel," in The Nation (copyright 1951 The Nation magazine, The Nation Associates, Inc.), Vol. 172, No. 25, June 23, 1951, pp. 592-93.
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