Publisher's Synopsis
FOR the New York Nation, Gilbert Caiman's "Young Earnest" exemplifies the overwhelming influence of Dostoevsky which is now flooding English fiction, notably in the works of authors like W. B. Maxwell. J. D. Beresford and half a dozen others. In "Young Earnest" one might point out "people, situations, turns of expression, which are straight from Dostoevsky, though modified - and not infrequently misapplied - in accordance with the English temperament and the writer's special equipment." Gilbert Cannan is a product of the new ages of novel writing, the Boston Transcript points out, in which all the problems of humanity and especially the problems of sexual humanity are looked upon as the legitimate field for fiction. But Mr. Cannan, according to this critic, has stretched even further the eclectic limits of the problem novel.
"His thesis is the relations of man and woman, and he states and argues his position not merely by means of the actions of his characters but also through long disquisitions in the form of dialog that frequently halt the progress of his story. He writes obviously to expound his own theories as to masculine duties and feminine rights, and it is clear at all times that he is more anxious to express his own opinions than to allow the reader to think they come direct from the minds of his characters. 'Marriage, ' he causes one of them, and a woman, to exclaim, 'Neither of you has a scrap of conventional religion. You can't possibly be worried by scruples. Really the marriage laws of this country are in such a mess that it has become almost a duty for decent people to transgress them. They won't be altered in our time, so there is nothing for it but to disregard them. You have quite enough real difficulties to face without troubling yourselves about artificial ones. A few virtuous people won't know you? What are they to you or you to them?' From this it would appear that the social regulations of England are not looked upon with either awe or reverence by Cannan."
-Current Opinion, Vol. 58
