SOURCE: “High Polish,” in The Progressive, Vol. 26, No. 1, January, 1962, pp. 49-50.

In the following excerpt, Johnson offers praise for False Entry.

Hortense Calisher’s False Entry is an immensely accomplished and fascinating first novel, one that, through both its ornate style and the obsession of its major character and narrator, engulfs the reader in its world.

Hortense Calisher’s narrator is a vicarious man, one who from earliest childhood has been a watcher and listener outside the inner circle of whatever group he has lived among. He has combined his longing to belong with a self-protective reluctance to give anything of himself to anyone, so that all relationships with others have been completely artificial on his side. In his forties this weakness has caused a crisis from which he seeks to extricate himself by writing a journal of his life as honestly as possible. This novel is that...