Reviews of the New Books

An Armload of the Month's Better Fiction

BURTON RASCOE

IN So Big (Doubleday, Page & Co.), Miss Edna Ferber, a most observing and resourceful guide, takes her reader by the arm and into her confidence and escorts him about Chicago, imparting an earful of information and no end of secrets. From her he learns how Chicago grew from a sprawling frontier town into a still crude but mighty city, with such surface pretentions to culture as money can buy; how corner butchers became barons of pork products and beef; and how fortunes were made in real-estate and steel.

Her interesting itinerary includes the truck-farms near the city, which supply the vegetables for the Chicagoan s table; the great market, where the farmers sell their produce to the jobbers; the University on the south side, with its Gothic spircs and its tremendous endowments; the State Street department stores, with their chic and slangy shop-girls; the Art Institute, with its life classes sketching from the nude; an exclusive club atop skyscraper, of which all the members are millionaires; the estate of a financier on the North Shore, with its paddock and vast garage, its luxurious house, and its retinue of servants; a young bachelors quarters; the city parks, and the Loop; commercial artist's studio, and a banker private office.

She not only lets you see these things; she tells you interesting thingsabout them, with incisive, critical, instructive, and philosophical comments. She tells you how stenographers and sales-girls manage to dress like Gold Coast debutantes; how young men, as cavdieri servenli to women of great wealth, are engineered into successful system operates financial in careers; our Middle-Western how the caste universities; how Chicago society women deport themselves; and how human values remain always pretty much the same.

Meanwhile, she has pressed your arm with a little show of emotion and told you an interesting story, laid in this complex milieu. It is the story of a woman of character and stamina, and of her son, who is deficient in these qualities. The mother, through toil and sacrifice, reaps the rewards of a creative life, adjusted to her temperament and capabilities; the son, with everything except character in his favour, becomes a successful business man, but a failure in life. It is, at points, poignant and convincing story; and after I had read it, I wished I could believe in it wholeheartedly. The reason I could not, I suspect, is that Miss Ferber has felt only one character in her novel— August Hempel; the others are ideas.

WHEN Michael Arlen published his first book, A London Venture, critics who do not hazard their opinions recklessly said that George Moore was on a holiday, and that Michael Arlen was a pseudonym for the penman of Ebury Street. That was a tnbute to Mr. Arlen, even if it implied only a more than usually successful talent for imitation; for George Moore's style is so subtle and elusive a perfection that Max Beerbohm confessed himself unequal to the task of parodying it. Arlen's new book is one of short stories entitled These Charming People (Doran), and it may be recommended to those who like literary truffles. It is light, buoyant, sophisticated; it contains Schnitzleresque trifles and gallant sentiments, edged with irony. It is a book picturing tear-drops in dancing, elfin eyes, gaiety, and sadness.

IN Rapture (Boni & Liveright), Richmond Brooks Barrett recounts for us the tribulations of the idle rich, the poor people with several generations of money behind them who are thrown upon the world with so many things ordered for their comfort and convenience that they can exercise their initiative only in a futile attempt to keep their family life integrated. In so restricted an atmosphere, it is inevitable that energies should find outlet in complexes and hysterias, in morbidity and atrophy. Mr. Barrett has told the story of the dissolution of such a family in Newport society, with artistic detachment and psychological understanding, with insight, sympathy, and conciseness.

BUDDENBROOKS (Knopf), translated from the German of Thomas Mann, is probably the finest study fiction of the thinning out of family blood, the degeneration of a once vigourous and active stock The house of Buddenbrooks is built upon the rock successful trade. The generation which succeeds the founder of the house enjoys the benefits of the leisure afforded by inherited wealth; the third generation totally unable cope vvith the forces which are undermining the family fortunes; and the last generation dwindles out the hazy futilities of an oversensitized dreamer for whom art is refuge from the ferocious and predatory grjp Df life. The novel, which is in two volumes, admirably translated, is beautifully composed, with the style always adapted to the material at hand, forceful and direct where the is elemental, and elusive and subtle when the Buddenbrooks become complex and highlycultivated. This is doubtless the greatest achievement by a German novelist durng the past quarter of a century.

ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT is a critic with restrained sentiinentni enthu siasms, amiability, and urbanity; an when he retails gossip, be does it with ss much good-natured grace that it would seem to be a pleasurable experience ever to be maligned by him. His latest book Encitanled Aisles (Putnam), is a happ3 substitute for an evening in company with good raconteurs who are in their best mood and form. It is a book ol essays about the world of the theatre the concert halls, the studios, the restau rants, writing folk, and the screen. Her is sophistication without swank, defer. ences paid with harm, prejudices airec without distemper, a pretty wit, anc civilized entertainment.

NEW YORK CITY, often symbolized as a modern Babel, is envisaged by Struthers Burt as The Inlerpreler's House (Scribner). Returning home after ten years of adventure and experiment abroad, Gulian Eyre extracth from the vast confusion of the metropolis a philos ophy of life to fit his individual need, a gospel, of resistant effort against the dis integrating forces he had seen working out to their logical conclusion in the war and the ensuing peace of exhaustion in Europe.

Unlike our more militant and scornful native critics, who declare that America has never possessed an indigenous cul ture, Mr. Burt affirms that we have had such a culture,but that it is dying because the old American stock is drifting, or being driven, from the soil. A people, without strong roots in some familiar bit of earth, quickly wither. However, Gulian Eyre is representative, not of a people, but of a class: the leisured class, whose tenure in America has always been precarious. The land is the one basis upon which an hereditary aristocracy can be reared; but for a landed gentry, there must be a peasant foundation.

Mr. Burt's style has a mannered charm; he is a romantic, pinned between the covers of The Atlantic Monthly, like Ariel in the cleft branch.