FICTION

HALF A LOOK OF CAIN: A Fantastical Narrative by William Goyen (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press; $22.50; 121 pp.). William Goyen became famous in literary circles in 1950 with the publication of “The House of Breath,” his first novel. He never attained commercial success, however; by the time of his death in 1983, he was virtually forgotten. Reginald Gibbons, editor of the literary periodical TriQuarterly, hopes to change that by bringing Goyen’s work back into print, a project begun with this previously unpublished novel. “Half a Look of Cain” was rejected by editors in the 1950s for its enigmatic narrative style and veiled references to homosexuality, but by modern standards the book, on both counts, is tame; the stories told here fit together rather like matroushka dolls, and Goyen’s subject is not the sexual act itself but the emotional and physical longing which precedes it. “Half a Look of Cain,” as a result, often feels dated, like a museum curio; the narrators--primarily a male nurse, his patient and a lighthouse keeper--express their interest in homosexual love--made most explicit through the story of a circus aerialist--only indirectly, causing the novel, however daring for its time, to seem coy today. The novel’s central philosophy--the yin-and-yang of love and destruction, of Cain and Abel--isn’t exactly new, either, yet it remains interesting because Goyen’s prose is admirable. It’s hard not to be moved when the nurse, at the end of the book, calls the 1950s “that time of the crippled mind, that time of the world when human beings, not being able to tell the truth about themselves, could not tell it about other people and so maimed themselves and everything they touched: that time of the crutch-war of the cripples.”