FICTION

By KATE O'BRIEN Tuts week's novels come to us, three from America and one from Ireland, countries whence various critics, according

to their bias, are inclined to think the best kinds of fiction are emerging nowadays. And certainly, whatever one may think of the general standard of merit of the present handful, there is among them one very sweet and gracious messenger

from New England.

Grandma Called It Carnal is very badly named, or so one thinks when surprised and charmed by the simple grace of the first pages—but, of course, by the end of the book one has got so much adjusted to the author's point of view, and so deeply interested in Grandma's fastidious and terrible austerity, that one forgets that dread of another cheap, glib, anti-Victorian joke which the title first evoked. And, indeed, it may be of use in attracting to the book many who, coming to mock, will stay, if not to pray, at least to muse in gratitude over virtues and humours already too long vanished from our vulgar world.

Grandma was born in a village of New England in 1829, and she died there in 1925. When she was approaching seventy she took her two orphan granddaughters to live with her. They were then aged six and five, and she brought them up. " The bringing up went on for nine years, and those nine years made a deeper impression on all three of us than any other period of our lives. For better, for worse, we none of us ever got over it." Grandma was a disciple of Thoreau and an implacable enemy of progress. She was extremely poor and extremely civilised. Kerosene lamps, water taps, cooking stoves were " carnal." Indeed, everything was that came in with the Industrial Revolution. She would never " encourage " the local train by riding in it. Her life was one long battle against ease, and the consequent deterioration of individuality and sensory perception, so that naturally, as her granddaughter notes affectionately, she was herself, or became through her passionate non-carnality, the most exact of sensualists. " Chaste, unjaded as her senses were, they were keener than those of any sinner in active pursuit of pleasure." For she was a gardener, a very knowledgeable flower-lover, a bather in cold well-water, a reader aloud of Shakespeare, Milton and the Bible, and an eater, only when truly hungry, of vegetables and fruits. " When I came home very hungry, I found in the buttery a platter of cold beet greens, and Bertha, the way I fell upon those greens and devoured them was nothing short of carnal."

She was a difficult woman, and a very great egoist. The little girls early discovered her wilfulness, and that their sad

Aunt Martha was the uncomplaining victim of her life of

dreamy distinction—as someone always has to be. Grandma was a shrewd and well-informed debater, but, right or wrong, she had to have the last word. In vain they tried to floor her. She liked spiders, and would not have them killed. " Very intelligent creatures. I like to watch their bright ways."

They thought to down her with the argument that bed-bugs are also pretty intelligent. " Not so intelligent," said Grandma, conclusively.

Perhabs I quote too much and linger too long on a light, sweet record which many might describe as entirely unim- portant. But I have not found it so. To accuse a writer of

charm nowadays is practically to kill her stone dead, but Mrs. I) anon has a grace of mind and pen which, both light and tender, does give the reader an easy, old-fashioned sense of

I,e'ng charmed along. But there is more than that here: there ,ureness, concealed strength. Beside the beautifully careful 'king-up of Grandma's personality there are grouped, barely )ked in in passing, a whole small world of unmistakably

I lg men and women, all true to their time and place. And ut them, in a lovely light, we see their weather, their set-

11.-1. their arch:tecture and their ancestry. In recording G',ndnaa, Mrs. Damon has done for New England rural life at 'he beginning of this century very much what Clarence Day d:f. for New York City and the 'eighties in Life With Father.

His method was as masculine as hers is feminine; instead of his very effective foursquare way of statement, hers is airy and allusive. Sometimes, but only very, very seldom, she trembles towards being arch. But the book is delightful ; though nostalgic it is true, and though amusing it is civilised. It should give universal pleasure.

From modest lucidity one turns in something like despair to the heat and turgid violence of Mr. Faulkner's newest work. This writer :s extraordinarily uneven and, one feels, not nearly critical enough of himself nowadays. The Wild Palms is actually two novels, the eponymous one and another called Old Man. Their chapters alternate regularly, both are set in the Mississippi region, they have a certain atmospheric and moody echo, each of the other, and both deal with misery, pre- senting it through overcharged and clumsy inarticulateness which, though deliberate and sometimes in the past highly effective in this author, here has gone to seed and become mere laziness. The use of parenthesis throughout this book is inexcusable.

I did not find much interest in either of the stories, though Old Man is the better, and contains some descriptions of flood and wilderness and weather which are Mr. Faulkner's forte, and which here, too, he often brings off impressively. But does a convict, swept from his prison life and to wild, awful perils in the Mississippi flood, struggling for his life against the waters, and suddenly trying also to rescue a pregnant woman from them, really think or feel as follows in such a moment?

. that profound and almost lethargic awkwardness which added nothing to the sum of that first aghast amazement which had served already for the- catafalque of invincible dream since even in durance he had continued (and with the old avidity, even though they had caused his downfall) to consume the impossible pulp- printed fables carefully censored and as carefully smuggled into the penitentiary. .

The convict, the woman and her baby, have a number of desperate, violent and exhausting adventures—very exhaust- ing anyhow to the reader—and finally he gets back to his penitentiary, and is very happy to do so. The hero of The Wild Palms begins as a rather touching young doctor in New Orleans, goes mad about an entirely improbable and worthless married woman, goes through every kind of misery with her for the sake of a physical frenzy between them which again is exhausting to read about, and ends up en route for the State Penitentiary, having killed her when attempting an abortion operation. It is a stormy, wearisome book, choked with words and very monotonous.

Mr. Flann O'Brien writes about Dublin, and seems to realise that if you want to do that now you have to be a mighty clever boy, with all sorts of tricks up your sleeve, and all the best references. This is, I believe, his first novel, and it is a brave parade of talent. It is, for one thing, a novel within a novel within a novel. That is, the chief narrator, a student in University College, makes elaborate notes for a novel he is going to write about a publican who always stays in bed, and proposes to write a novel about a lot of curious characters, who in turn begin to write a novel about him. This maze gives a wide field for imaginative exercise, and Mr. O'Brien plunges around it most athletically, taking a cue from Joyce, not merely about atmospherics in general, but also about the fun to be had in parodying famous styles of writing. Inevit- ably, anyone who mimics Joyce will also be caught in his slyer moments mimicking Sterne ; but Mr. O'Brien finds no trouble either in giving us a dash of Gogarty, or a flavour of early James Stephens, while his parody of Irish Bardic literature is extremely well carried through—but is more likely to tickle the Sassenach ear than to please those readers who were at school in Ireland when the Celtic Twilight hung deep upon the classrooms. For my part, I long ago heard all I am ever likely to respond to, in jest or earnest, of the heroes and heroics of ancient Ireland. But I like Mr. O'Brien's realistic passages, and his lively undergraduate rudeness.

F.O.B. Detroit is a story of the life of workers in a great motor manufactory. It is interesting in its matter-of-fact de- scriptions of the actual routine of such a place, and of the anxieties, neuroses and hardships that go with all this fever of mass production. But the hero of the story, Russ, who was, quite justifiably, an individualist and a rebel, is, alas, portrayed very sentimentally indeed, and his sloppy dreams and general tone of self-righteousness are boring.