Fiction
" Cass Timberlane," says its blurb, " is a novel of the stature of Arrowsmith, Babbitt and Main Street . . . the intense story of a marriage . . . written with unsparing realism and satire, yet with tenderness and maturity 'of understanding. Here are passion and struggle between a man and a woman, etc. . . ." The present reviewer does not agree. Mr. Lewis has shrunk indeed of late from the great days of Babbitt, but this last book, rambling and foolish, is a very great disappointment. To load a narrative of marriage with all its customary external details so that nothing is left out is not the same thing as to write of it with intensity, and indeed the " passion and struggle " of this man and woman are so soft, so materialistic and so banally selfish that almost they are not there at all.
Cass is an elderly district judge ; he falls in love with a girl whom he sees in his courtroom ; she works as a draughtsman in the town, and he gets to know her, courts her and marries her. The ruling class of Grand Republic, Minnesota, of which Cass is an admired member, is much perturbed by this marriage, but in a series of parties and social occasions of an extraordinary and somewhat amusing crudity, Jinny breaks down most of the antagonisin of her husband's friends, and the two begin their long, repetitive struggle towards true love. Jinny is lively and vain; and Cass is obstinate and possessive ; they fight .their tough-sentimental duel against a sort of moving frieze of episodes from or glimpses into the married lives of practically all the citizens of Grand Republic. This device of at once letting up on the central two and illuminating their theme seems good at first, and some of the episodes, written with the old Sinclair Lewis savagery, are vigorous and pointed, but they are too many. The book is very long, and dawdles wearisomely, through what seems in the end to have dwindled into one endless and selfish bedroom wrangle. There is a kitten, for sweetness, and much other evidence of sentimentality, perhaps to offset the astonishing crudity of practically everyone's conversation.
We Are Besieged is a steady, pedestrian tale of life in Ireland, and chiefly in Dublin, between 1920 and 1930. The Adairs are a Protestant and UnioniSt family living in Fitzwilliam Square, and the daughters of the house, growing up in a new Ireland, have much to learn as they adjust themselves to a changing society. They are helped by an intelligent father, but violently hindered by a mother whose hatred of Eire amounts to mania. The story is a bit slow, but it is careful and 'serious, and quite pleasantly written. The King's General is a large, romantic tale of Cornwall and Cavalier-and-Roundhead. Sir Richard Greville is its stormy, star- crossed hero, and his tale is told picturesquely and with embellish- ments of feeling by Mistress Honor Harris, whom he loved and who had hoped to marry him. It is a story for the teen-age, or at least it is the sort of story that the teen-age liked to read long ago when I was in my teens. I do not know whether it will appeal to the fourteen-year-olds' of nowadays, but it is carried along in fluent, swashbuckling style and has that ring of conviction that-marks Miss du Maurier's work.
Miss Leigh, who is a Scot, writes of Mary Queen of Scots. Ho novel covers the period between the birth of Prince James and Mary's eventual abdication and imprisonment. It is an informative piece of work, and worshippers of Mary Stuart will doubtless applaud its enthusiasm, but in style it is dull, and unimaginative, lad, the author has not been able to infuse life into this re-creation of one who, whatever else she was, was notoriously lively. KATE 0131UE N.
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