Scatterfield, Ohio, the creation of Emerson Price, is drab, at times sordid, but life here has its moments of joyous vitality. It is here, in this place, in “the inn of that journey?—the brief moment in life?s long travail—that Price has chosen to capture boyhood?s existence, whose many moods he has sketched with precision and pity.

The result is a memorable album of the Scatterfield gang: Mark Cullen, the new school superintendent?s son, who hates school; Olin Pendleton, better known as Soap Dodger because of his aversion to baths; Cockie Werner, whose father used to quiet his howls as a baby by stuffing a pillow about his face; Nutsie Doane, whom the gods would destroy without making proud; and Wickie Winters, imbecile, whose delight at the sight of blood was a clue to a future no one recognized.

Far from being a book for boys, how­ever, this brilliantly perceptive novel recalls Winesburg, Ohio, except that whereas Sherwood Anderson stresses the psychology of his characters, Price stresses their environment. Price?s world is realer than that of Anderson, more carefully observed—and uglier.

It is part of Emerson Price?s strength that he has presented clearly a subject that novelists often have distorted: the real existence of boys. Price is truth­ful about the smut and squalor of his characters? environment. Hence it is his concern about what happens to them—and about what could happen to them—that informs Price?s vision of boyhood?s brief moment.