In this, his second major novel in two years, John Horne Burns wields an unbated sword of satire and sarcasm in a one-sided duel. With extraordinary dexterity, Burns has severed the suspenders of a certain unnamed New England private school, exposing its tattered foundation of tradition, clique, and petty prejudice. The parallel with this certain school seems to be all too accurate.

"Lucifer with a Book" describes the thoughts and experiences of a young veteran during his first--and last--year as an instructor at The Academy Fortunately gifted with more than a little insight and maturity, Guy Hudson unsuccessfully bucks the sham and hypocrisy of the school's ingrown existence, causing a mild upheaval in the Faculty. He is all too glad to leave The Academy in June with his pregnant sweetheart (a teacher at the neighboring Girls' School) in tow.

During the course of the year, every conceivable facet of the school's decadence is ruthlessly assaulted. Guy Hudson does most of the attacking, although the high point of the story (but the low point for the aging Principal, Mr. Pilkey) is the resignation of Judge Hopkins V as Chairman of the Board of Trustees, in protest to Mr. Pilkey's attempts to "pack" the Board with Alumni. "No sir," says the Judge, "I shall simply watch you and your school with the amused detachment of one who is in the know, with the Olympian shrug of a former lover watching his ex-mistress go to seed."

Here, in effect, is the meat of the whole novel. In his 25 despotic years as Principal, Mr. Pilkey has blandly followed what he considers to be a righteous path, moulding The Academy into a "democratic," pristine Place of Study.

And democratic The Academy surely is. Why, even Ben Gordon, Jew, a was president of the Student Council. (But Ben was forced to resign when he refused to participate in The Academy's program of military training.) And this year we have with us a Negro boy, Tad McKinley. (But Tad is expelled a week before his graduation for making love to his girl at Spring Prom.) Happily, our new Council President is a fine lad, Buddy Brown; we're sure Buddy will do a fine job. (Buddy is a little stinker, but we treat him kindly because his father is a Very Influential Man.)

John Horne Burns does not waste words. In a phrase or two, he can put across far more than could paragraphs of pedantic description. Consider his characterization of Mr. Philbrick Grimes, the school busybody, who "zoomed into Princeton at seventeen," and "Kept up a figurative rubbing all the time he talked, like a cat sounding out a hearth." Yet Burns speaks not only as critic, but as philosopher as well: "Capitalism, at least when it's unpanicky, has always tolerated revolutionary criticism from within its own body."

"Lucifer with a Book" is not merely an accurate dissection of a specific school; it is a challenge to the teachers of America. "Was it perhaps that all these people who called themselves custodians of education were merely spineless dolls with the guts of sawdust, living in pretense because they refused to accept life as it was? Was it that those who called themselves teachers were merely playing politics on an enclosed checkerboard and parroting the thoughts of the Dead Great because it gave them a vicarious importance and authority? Did America perhaps justly laugh at her teachers and humiliate them because they asked for it?" It is a challenge for teachers with a sense of responsibility, with a conscience.