Four Novelists Look At America

THE range and contrast of contemporary American fiction arc well indicated in this review contributed by Mary Ross, one of the editors of the Survey.

IN Mary’s Neck (Doubleday, Doran, $2.50), Booth Tarkington brings together pleasures his readers have learned to anticipate: the rocky Maine coast with its opposition of taciturn ‘natives’ and gushing ‘summer people’; the lovable antics of the age of puppy hood and of elders whose adolescence does not always pass with the years; the sympathetic satire of the small-town spirit. This story is told by Mr. Massey, trotting amiably behind his wife and daughters as they arrive from Logansville, Illinois, to conquer New England. They came in an April as chilly as the welcome of the villagers; they saw, bit by bit, that the impressive exclusiveness of their fellow cottagers and the revered traditions of old Maine had human undercurrents not so very differenl from those of Logansville; and they conquered, thanks to the good looks of Enid and Clarissa, the persistence of Mrs. Massey, and the dollars and humorous common sense of the nominal head of the house. In the wake of their triumph Mr. Tarkington strews the ’debunking’ of an ultramodern ‘art colony’; a learned lecturer, whose life work was to preserve the thirty-four surviving members of the tribe of the Ogilluwayas; the cult and racket of the antique; the pious protests of parents against the ‘wildness’ of modern youth, less unbridled in fact than their own middle-aged caperings. To borrow a New England product for simile, Mary’s Neck has the delectable quality of lemon-meringue pie —— overflowing fun on a blandly tart and filling basis.

Like Mr. Tarkington, Anne Parrish has made her mark as a satirist of the middle class. Loads of Love (Harpers, $2.50) bears further witness of the deftness and lightness of her touch. Unlike Mary’s Neck, however, it carries an undertone of tragedy, for Bessie Plummer (who always ended her letters ‘with loads of love’) is one of those well-meaning blunderers who quite literally can kill with kindness. Bessie had money, good intentions, and endless energy. She charged into delicate situations like, shall we say, a cow in a china shop, unaware of the wreckage over which she careered in quest of romance. In the hands of a less penetrating writer, Bessie’s blunders might have made farce, but Miss Parrish is at once too subtle and too temperate to let her story get out of hand. The real disasters were the result not only of Bessie’s ineptitude but also of the hypersensitiveness of her victims. The author’s rapier tilts against the weak, the self-indulgent, as well as the stupid. In exasperation you will fairly ache to tear Bessie out of this book and tie her up out of harm’s way — and I doubt if you can lay down her story before the end.

It is a quite different view of America that one gets in The Chinaberry Tree (Stokes, $2.00) by Jessie Fauset. To add that Miss Fauset is one of our foremost Negro writers is not to imply that she would wish or need to have her work considered on the basis of any racial quality, but merely to give a fact relevant to her understanding of the life site describes. The Chinaberry Tree is laid in a New Jersey town among a group of Negro families of means, education, and breeding. As Zona Gale points out in the introduction, there are in American towns and cities thousands of such families who ‘carry on their lives, educate their children, and fill their time with interests social, domestic, and philanthropic as if there were no white people in America save those who serve them in shops and in traffic.’ The story of Sarah Strange and the white man who loved her for years, though he could not marry her, of their daughter, Laurentiree, and of Sarah’s niece, green-eyed Melissa, is laid, in Miss Fauset s words, in une of the ‘breathing spells, in-between spaces where colored men and women work and love and go their ways with no thought of the “problem.”’ One need not add that joy, sorrow, love, ambition, pride, and prejudice play the same parts in this life as in other American circles. Though the story’s setting is distinctive, its charm and its strong appeal lie not in the. color of its characters but in Miss Fauset’s grasp of experience of meaning for all of us. A novel to be read.

John Dos Passos’s preceding book, The 42d Parallel, launched a form of the novel which could not be disregarded even by those who quarreled with it. Here, in 1919 (Harcourt, Brace, $2.50), he carries through the war years a chronicle of America, independent, of the earlier story, but continuous in time. It has the same fourfold plan, weaving together differing elements to give a whole greater than the sum of individuals and events: the sections called Newsreel—snatches of current popular songs, newspaper stories and headlines; the Camera Eye, the author’s subjective memories of those years at Harvard and in Europe; a series of unforgettable portraits of men — Jack Reed, Randolph Bourne, ’Meester Veelson,’ Joe Hill of the I. W. W. and others; and. interspersed among these, chapters of the stories of people-a young poet with the American Ambulance, the daughter of a Chicago minister, a spectacled radical from New York’s East Side, a girl from Texas adrift in boarding school and in Italy. Through these facets there gleam a central purpose no less than epic and an accomplishment which seems to me as fine as anything that our time has produced. For 1919 has as its theme not any one person or class, but the whole movement of hopes and desires in contrast and conflict that constitute the life of a people. It is not a book for the mere beguiling of an idle hour; it asks and deserves concentration. It will offend some readers by its directness of word and unconventional point of view. But I cannot believe that any who will grant the author his outlook — whatever their owncan fail to be stirred by its richness, honesty, and power.

MARY ROSS