Rating: 2.5* of five

There are over 400pp of words, more or less elegant, telling this story of snobbery, racism, infidelity, and unhappiness. The prose is mid-century bestseller (forty weeks on the New York Times list; finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction) bog-standard stuff, with a very few memorable lines; here's one:

The white man could not accept the Negro as an equal—he simply could not, and yet, since the Negro was walking, talking, living, he could not deny his reality as a human being.

Why I wouldn't rate the book lower is the Southern transplant sent "home" to solve an apparent embezzlement wrote a book as a young scholar called Shinto Traditions in the American South, which is fucking genius and, in fact, needs to be written ASAP.

The 1955 film gets the same 2.5* of five

Go listen to the love theme from the film. It is gorgeous, lush, intense...all the things the film just...isn't. It's beautiful, and curiously empty. But goodness me, what a spectacle! ( )

521. The View from Pompey's Head, by Hamilton Basso (read 26 Sep 1957) There is a Wikipedia article on this book. Many years after I read the book (and made no contemporary written comment thereon) I saw the movie based on the book. ( )

A dissapointment. The book was essentially a look at life in a small southern town, where lineage meant evertything. The idea for the plot was good and the presentation of the plot was good but it never matured into anything of real substance. ( )

View From Pompey's Head was a best seller and made into a movie the year after it was published. It's smart and sexy with enough drama to make it interesting on the big screen. Anson is a stuck-in-a-rut lawyer in New York City. Married with a family he is trying to make his way in the big city despite being a small-town southern boy who hasn't been home in 15 years. It's not that he was running away from Old Pompey, Georgia - but trying to outgrow it. That's his story on the surface, anyway.
Through a series of coincidences Anson has a work assignment that returns him to his old stomping grounds. A client of his law firm is being sued for embezzlement. Royalties from an author have gone missing. It looks bad for the firm because the client is dead and can't defend himself and what is worse, all evidence points to his guilt. Anson, having ties to the author's remote hometown, is picked to try to get to the bottom of the mystery. ( )