New Novels
THE somewhat dragging days of interim which we are going through at present ought to be good, one supposes, for novel- reading, and if that is so the habitual novel-reader, i.e., the patient addict who is neither captious nor quite undiscerning, should find something to his taste among the three books listed above. The simplest, and the most consistently entertaining, is High Sierra. Mr. Bumett's earlier work is unknown to me, but the wrapper describes him as "the masterly reporter of the under- world," and he certainly does appear to know his gangster stuff. Better than that, he knows how to hold it together and make it march in decent narrative form. He sees it as legitimate material, in fact, and does not have to bone and pulp it, removing all predi- cates' &c., before offering it home to our business and bosoms. In fact, this author is not primarily moved by the all-but-unmanage- able sensibility of the gangster, which has hitherto broken the hearts and prose styles of too many American writers; rather he views him detachedly as a man of natural aPpetites and rational processes, who takes the wrong turning for likely and unremark- able reasons, as you or I might-1%0mm moyen sensuel who, being possessed of a little more than average physical courage and authority, happens by circumstances rather than by force of in- nate exhibitionism to become a criminal.
This traditional attitude to character, supported and high- lighted by such true sentimentalities as, say, the ex-convict's nostalgia for his father's farm in Indiana and the innocendes of rural boyhood—will encourage the fussy reader to set out with Roy Earle on his last "big job." He has just been " sprung " out of "stir," and his chief, who has a high opinion of him, sends him to "knock over a swell joint," a fashionable hotel at a plea- sure resort in California. Mac the chief, is after "the rocks" this time; but there is money to he grabbed also. Roy sets out by road for the West; he is tired from six years "in stir "; he is dejected and sentimental; on the way down he forms a sentimental attachment with a dreary little girl who happens to be afflicted with a club foot; when he joins his appointed gang in the high Sierra, the girl who is hanging round, his two undergangsters forms a sentimental and true attachment to him. He exasperates her with his mooning after the little cripple girl, whose club- foot he has had cured, and who, in payment, exasperates and dis- illusions him. He arranges and carries through his job at Tropico Springs, but, as various small signs had suggested, things go wrong. His luck is gone, and after anxious and exciting attempts to square it, he dies the gangster's fighting death. Justice is done, but the pang of regret which the author wrings from us is more justifiable, or at least more excusable' than usual. Roy Earle is a live character, normal and natural; his story has pace and warmth as well as form; and the slang is lovely.
Living Space purports to cover the emotions of five days and of several characters in a gloomy row of villas in a provincial town. It exploits the cross-section method, extracting therefrom a better-than-average level of quick character-drawing, and occa- sional passages of really good work. The story of the grammar- school boy, Cockeye' who is "a born mathematician" and is driven into insane aberrations by sexual misery, is the most complete as well as the most moving of the too many themes which cross in these two hundred and eighty-five pages; also- the sketch of the "wide boy," David Carr, is good, and the tempera- ment and anguish of the young bus-conductor whose wife is in labour are written with moving economy. But the various old and elderly women who spy and pray and plot up and down the Terrace seem to me to run too easily in type-grooves; one does not believe particularly in any of them, and there is some diffi- culty, as they shuffle in and out of the pattern, in keeping them distinct from each other. However, in spite of the flashy con- vention of its form, the book has originality of atmosphere, and is written with bitterness and compassion.
Mr. Richard Church's new book, The Room Within, will be welcomed by admirers of The Porch and The Prodigal Son, but in spite of vigorous workmanship, some pleasing eccentricity of scene and character, and occasional flashes of poetic light, I found myself unable to dnd inner vitality in the chief characters, who gave me the impression of being worked for all they were worth from outside; especially did I feel this of the girl, Phyllis Brennan, who was far too lavishly characterised for truth. One longed for Mr. Church to let his puppets alone for a space here and there, while he got on with the entertng business of herb-dealing al the city, which certainly monopolises the most entertaining pas- sages of this novel. In general, the work is too fussy, and the preoccupations of the not very interesting characters seem finallY rather niggling in proportion to the analysis bestowed upon them But there is some good descriptive writing, and the book does carry, as I have said, a certain poetic, if unsatisfactory, light.
KATE O'BRIEN
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