LINCOLN KIRSTEIN'S first novel, "Flesh is Heir" might be said to show great promise for the future rather than attainment in the present. It deals with the generation that followed the war, only vicariously affected by its disillusion and despair. The method is autobiographical; so much so in fact, that many who know the author or even who know Cambridge can recognize various of the characters. The novel, or "historical romance" as it is called, is composed of a series of episodes, almost short stories, of the youth of one Roger Baum during the last decade. First at a preparatory school, then in a stained glass works, subsequently in London and Paris, at college, and in the country, he meets life in various forms and is some-what passively affected by it. He is not a very real character; he does not act, but is merely acted upon.

At times the book is a mere exposition of Mr. Kirstein's erudition, but not often; at others it expresses truly deep and intense feeling. There is little description and less comment. The story is told in a straightforward fashion by convincing conversation in short scenes that are admirably contrasted.

The first episode is perhaps the best. Here Mr. Kirstein is really penetrating. The scene is at school where Roger meets a mystical, imaginative boy, Andy, who comes to have a great influence over him. Finally, through a weird kind of fear he makes Roger completely subservient to him. Despite its strangeness, the story is quite real. In a glass works he finds artistic temperament struggling against industrialization. He tries to fight for it in the patronizing manner of a rich man's son and fails miserably. The situation is inevitable.

At college he meets up with an entirely different type of personality, the dissolute son of an aristocratic family, who, despite his foibles, is extremely lovable and truly pathetic. The other chapters are for the most part weak and trivial. The death of Diahilev and the end of the Russian ballet are treated sentimentally; the marriage of Roger's friend, Coronado, amusingly. The rest lacks force. There is a strained attempt at intensity, and a certain superficial sophistication; but little more. The ending with its "Violent new force" about which the publishers talk so glibly leaves one up in the air. It is equivocal and vague, and was probably meant to be so.

Mr. Kirstein writes well. He knows how to handle a dramatic situation simply. His prose can b e powerful and direct, and his characters, real. But somehow he seldom realizes his possibilities; they are usually just beyond his grasp. In the future with greater maturity he may perhaps do so. R. M. M.