Books: Is Anybody Happy?

AND ON THE EIGHTH DAY (111 pp.)—Abner Dean—Simon & Schuster ($2.95).

Cartoonist Abner Dean’s publishers claim that psychiatrists try out his drawings on their patients. The average beholder who looks at And on the Eighth Day hard and long enough is apt to wonder whether it is he or the artist who is in need of a session on the confessional couch. Dean, a successful commercial artist and nephew of revolutionary Sculptor Jacob Epstein, has some of the humor of a Thurber or a Steig: but he is not trying to be funny. This is his third book of drawings (the others: It’s a Long Way to Heaven, What Am I Doing Here?), all owed to the remorseless probings of Drs. Freud and Jung. Like the others, it is a grim search through the weird subconscious levels of John Doe, a search that altogether misses heart & soul but finds a spirit crushed and shriveled by what Abner Dean considers the terrors of everyday 20th Century life.

Unlike the best of his earlier drawings, these are vaguer in outline, foggier in theme, harder to unravel. Like them, they feature literal and psychological nakedness. His first two books were worth the time of anyone who was willing to look at himself in psychic undress and momentarily exchange his individuality for the plight of today’s mythical Everyman. Dean doesn’t have “entirely different thoughts now” (see cut); he merely has more incomprehensible ones. Psychiatrists may decide that Dean is now poking around at a deeper level of the subconscious; to plain folks and old-fashioned artists, it may merely seem that Dean conceived and drew them in a hurry.