Frederic Prokosch wrote this imaginary journey from Lebanon across Asia to Hanoi in 1931 before he ever set foot in Asia. In the novel, the narrator, a young American, travels in catch-as-catch-can manner across the exotic continent. The landscape descriptions are extraordinary. Everywhere he meets with adventure and exotic characters who lament the end of Asia as they know it (this in 1931!). The novel was a bestseller in 1934. I nominate it as the greatest forgotten novel of the 20th Century.

This is an engaging tale of a young man coming of age in the 1930s US Depression. Tom is a sheltered youth working on his uncle's Wisconsin farm when his uncle dies and he must return to his father's farm in Texas. Pete, one of the farm hands, suggests that they could get to Texas together on the $33 that Tom has. Tom and Pete join an army of out of work drifters crisscrossing the land, working at odd jobs for their meals and sleeping under the stars. Tom loses Pete along the way and falls in love with Lucy, a young runaway girl, only to lose her too.

Radcliffe Squires in his 1964 book, FREDERIC PROKOSCH, says, "Night of the Poor aims at combining a story of an innocent youth's experience with an allegory of America rendered bitter and aimless by the economic depression of the 1930's." Mr. Squires goes on to say "the boy's groping toward maturity and understanding embodies the notion of youthful America which now must also put aside pioneer frontiers like childish things and grow up." This is an excellent summation of the novel. Sadly there is not much criticism available of Prokosch novels. Squires is the only person to write a book about the author and he calls this book, I think very undeservedly, one of Prokosch's poorest novels. It deserves a second reading by American readers.

Written at the end of the Depression on the eve of the US entry into World War II, the novel portrays the devastating effects of the Depression on the US. All along the way Tom finds people down on their luck and without resources, pushed to the limits of their endurance. The people are the strange refuse of a society cut to the bone by poverty. Fortunately, the author is able to capture the generous and loving spirit of the American people even at their darkest hour. Yet this is no fairy tale America. Along the way the boy witnesses a murder, a rape, and a lynching. Prokosch hints at a new nation being born out of this painful period. His image of a nation coming to maturity as revealed through the maturing vision of a youthful innocent takes on a mystical and dream-like quality.

Possibly the people of the time were too close to the reality of the events to appreciate this work. Possibly on the eve of war with Germany, the US was turning its back on a writer of German heritage. Whatever the reasons the novel didn't succeed when first published, it is today an insightful look at a country caught between the Depression of the 1930s and the World War of the 1940s.

Frederic Prokosch is the author I would most wish to save from what Gore Vidal has called "time's winged wastebasket." Born in 1908, his career extended from the early 1930's to the 1980's. He combines an extraordinary talent for description and a lush romantic prose style that never crosses the line into being purple with a modern -- nearly existential -- sensibility. One might think the two would conflict, but remarkably they don't. Prokosch invests scenes of near-total bleakness with stunning beauty, and describes scenes of the most intense beauty with a sometimes disturbing detachment. His gift for language surpasses any American of his era except Fitzgerald (and they are neck and neck), but the quality of his thought is clearer. Fitzgerald learned his style from Keats, but Prokosch seems by temperament much more capable of the negative capability Keats extolled. The influence of Prokosch, who was perhaps more widely read in Europe than in the U.S. (his home country), can be found in magical realism (Garcia-Marquez, Bowles) and in the current generation of European authors (Rushdie, Kundera, etc.).

_The Seven Who Fled_ is Prokosch's second novel, a follow-up to _The Asiatics_, whose debut had brought him considerable critical praise. Both novels are set in Asia, a continent Prokosch knew at that time only from maps and National Geographic surveys. Whereas _The Asiatics_ follows one young American from Trebizond (on the Black Sea) to Indochina, _The Seven Who Fled_ follows (naturally) seven characters with different backgrounds who start out together but are scattered by political upheaval and try to escape from central Asia. Following seven characters allows Prokosch to more fully explore the human condition -- the different ways people react to the unfamiliar and to danger, the different fates that result either from their decisions or simple bad luck -- than he could with one, though of course he sacrifices some dramatic unity in the process.

The seven characters are of different nationalities, genders, belief systems, etc. But rather than -- as with many books of that era and ours -- the characters becoming representative types, a thinly disguised way for the author to generalize about their respective categories, what comes through is a broader sense of the inadequacy of any one narrow viewpoint. We may like or dislike certain of the characters, but they hold our interest because of their common humanity -- and, at times, their inhumanity.

I have no desire to spoil the outcome of the novel for any who can find it, since it is currently out of print. But I would hold up certain scenes for comparison with any written in the 20th century. For example, one of the characters freezes to death, and the chapter which his progress slows and stops and his mind drifts to the home he will never see again is masterly, indeed quite superior to any similar scene written by Jack London.

Prokosch would turn to the far east again in his fiction -- _The Dark Dancer_, set in medieval India, is quite good -- but these first two novels are arguably his best until _The Missolonghi Manuscript_, a faux-memoir of Byron's last days in Greece. Perhaps it is the stoic aspects of eastern philosophy and religion that drew him, for the sensibility in his novels is very nearly Buddhist in its overall detachment while remaining Romantic in its particulars. Whatever it was, the world he has imagined will likely strike you so powerfully that you will choose to return more than once.

This is a great story and the best part is that it is true. It is a novel based on historic fact and Prokosch did a considerable amount of research to be sure he got the facts right. The story is of a famous murder in Rome that occurred in 1598. Beatrice Cenci, the young daughter of a wealthy Roman count, killed her father with the help of her brother, her stepmother and her lover. A year later they were all found guilty and executed for the crime. The story has been told many times before in history books, fiction, plays, poems, and even music. Probably the most famous version in English is Percy B. Shelley's play, The Cenci, written in 1819. Although a great play, Shelley doesn't always get the facts straight.

This is the first novel that Frederic Prokosch wrote based on historic fact and he did a lot of research to ensure the accuracy of what he wrote. Prokosch was highly regarded in his time but now, a generation later, he has been mostly forgotten. This is sad because he is a great writer with an engaging style. His descriptive prose reveals his background as a poet, yet his dialog is crisp and direct. He writes mostly about the aftermath of the murder and the events leading up to the trial, detailing the tangled web of hearsay, rumor and fact that always follows a crime of national interest.

Highly recommended for lovers of historic fiction.