FLAMING YOUTH. By Warner Fabian. (Stanley Paul and Co. is.
6d. net.)
"Warner Fabian" is a pseudonym under which a physician has written a study of the "twentieth-century woman of the luxury class." The author himself offers the best excuse for the book :— " Women writers when they write of women evade and conceal and palliate. Ancestral reticences, sex loyalties, dissuade the pen. Men writers when they write of women do so without comprehen- sion. Men understand women only as women choose to have them, with one exception, thc family physician. He knows. He sees through the body to the soul. But he may not tell what he sees. Professional honour binds him. Only through the unaccustomed medium of fiction and out of the vatic incense-cloud of pseudonymity may he speak the truth."
The dedication of the book shows the type of modern woman he depicts :— " To the woman of the period thus set forth, restless, seductive, greedy, discontented, craving sensation, unrestrained, a little morbid, more than a little selfish, intelligent, uneducated, sybaritic, following blind instincts and perverse fancies, slack of mind as she is trim of body, neurotic and vigorous, a worshipper of tinsel gods at perfumed altars, fit mate for the hurried, reckless and cynical man of the age, predestined mother of—what manner of being ? To her I dedicate this study of herself."
This book should be considered more as a psychological and sociological document than as a novel. Artistically it is negligible, but not offensive. This, however, is to some extent compensated by its amazingly keen observation and its soundly realistic psychology. Moreover, its transcription of the slang of the younger generation in America is perfect.
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