Reviews of the Week
Fiction
It is proper occasionally to state the criterion by which one is making judgements, and this week I must admit that mine is enjoyment. Your review is being written beside a jewel-blue sea on the west coast of Scotland, and the books that seem most pleasing here are not the ones that deepen one's experience of distressing experiences, but those which soothe and encourage the delighted mind.
So in choosing books in order of enjoyment, an easy first place goes to Nicholas and Antoinette, a novel of unforced sim- plicity and beauty. Antoinette is a peasant, youngest of a large family living in a wooden chalet high up in the mountains of French Savoy. The country in which she lives, its beauties large and minute, are described with reminiscent love, and it is the love of Antoinette herself for her mountains that forms the abiding theme of the book. The large family is destroyed or dispersed, and it seems that Antoinette must leave the chalet and live in the despised lowlands for ever. For ten years she and her dearly loved cousin and husband, Nicholas, work in Paris to save from the pittance they earn enough to take them back to the mountains. Eventually they can return, for many years to prosperity and security, at last to lonely poverty and old age.
When the book ends they will soon be dead, but as long as they live they will be happy in their love for each other and for their mountains. This is an exquisite book, beautiful in its loving descriptions of life in the high mountains and of nobility of character.
At first sight, to choose 132y Almighty as a novel for enjoyment may seem strange, for the book is about a tubercular patient in an American state sanatorium. Its hero, Eric, is a farm-boy come to the city, a thinker, a putative novelist, an utter failure in life but of potential strength and goodness. He can recover from his disease only by exercising the utmost self-control, physical and mental, and almost to the end of the book one is uncertain whether he will succeed or be conquered by the lethargy and cynicism of most of the patients around him. Like so many American novels this one is written with a forceful gusto that refrains from saying none of these things that we English would mention only in cryptic phrases and subtle allusions ; when Eric likes poetry, the very poetry he likes is written out for us, and when he thinks the fumbling philosophi- cal thoughts of the untrained introspective, we are spared none of them. The result is sometimes naive and sometimes vulgar, but the book attains its effect by the complete sincerity that shines from the writer through his hero and through all the characters he has created.
The Peaceable Kingdom has a band round its jacket describing it as " an intensely human story of family life in the household of a polygamist." This, though literally true, is misleading. The book is, in fact, about the second wife of a Salt Lake City Mormon in the latter part of the last century, which is not, surely, the usual connotation of the word " polygamist " to-day.
The odd details of Mormon life and custom are fascinating—the " garments," for instance, which are undergarments with very strange symbolic embroidery on them, still obligatory for believers to-day. It's a relief to learn that polygamy did not, generally speaking, work ; usually the various wives were maintained in separate establishments and loathed each other with flaming jealousy, while the husbatid led a dog's life between, them. But Mormonism is no more than the background to the story of Linnea, the second wife of Olaf the tailor, and her family of children brought up almost without a father since Olaf had constantly to beware of the U.S. Marshals who haunted Salt Lake City to catch and prosecute the law-breaking poly- gamists. The author has written with that absence of self- consciousness that one finds in such books as Little Women, with the result that the successful struggle to buy toe-slippers is a major victory for the reader too, and the agonising death of little Parley an unbearable defeat. Linnea herself is as whole- some as good bread—and only one proviso must be made to enjoyment of this homely happy book, and this is that it's essentially a book for women.
Lastly Henry, nd this book I didn't really enjoy very much. The author's first book, Alice, was one of those consciously naive novels that are having such a vogue at present. Now a writer may be consciously or unconsciously naive when writing a first novel, but it doesn't wash a second time, as Anita Loos discovered. In Henry the naivety is so pronounced that I read half the book assuming the narrator to be a young eighteen and was profoundly shocked to discover her twenty-seven. Indeed, all the characters seem mentally undeveloped to a distressing degree, and it is tiresome to read of troubles that wouldn't exist if only trivial people would be their ages. What the book is about is, of course, Henry, the narrator's brother, who is sup- posed to be one of those worthless creatures with irresistible charm, but as we never see him doing anything except getting drunk and going to race-meetings, the charm seems to have evaporated long before we arrive. Certainly the author has a pretty turn of wit and an aptitude for quotable epigrams, but I do hope that she and her characters grow up before she starts her next novel. I mustn't forget to tell you, by the way, that Anne, the narrator, finds lodgings with a highbrow group by answering an advertisement in the New Statesman which, to placate her mother, she says she saw in the Spectator.
MARGHANITA LASKI.
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