A "GOLD-DIGGER" AT LARGE
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. By Anita Love. (Brentano's, Ltd).
ALL New York in the late autumn began to drink this literary cocktail. Twenty thousand copies a month of it are being consumed on the other side. Now this irresponsible aperitif has crossed the Atlantic and—slightly overweighted by its masquerade as a full-length novel—makes its appeal to English readers.
The book is, of course, a satire—very cleverly executed, for never once does the authoress let the argot of the Bronx in which it is written relapse into ordinary American prose. Indeed, it is safe to say that there is not a grammatical sen- tence in the whole two hundred pages. There is not very much true wit in it all, but a good deal of humour ; it is, for instance, an amusing idea that in Vienna the -heroine should have an interview with " Dr. Froyd " : " So Dr. Froyd and I had quite a long talk in the -English langwidge." In the course of this conversation the young lady demonstrated—doubtless to the surprise of the psychologist—that she never dreamt of anything at all. Though the details are humorous there is a devastating sameness in the heroine's adventures ; this per- haps would also be the case in a truthful autobiography of a man-eating tigress. Greed, not sensuality, is the keynote of the production and no cleverness of writing can divest this theme of its inevitable Sordidness.
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