This Country of Yours
This Country of Yours, by [Little, Brown, $3.00]
AN American in quest of America is a rare phenomenon. Most of the questing seems to be done by foreigners who write even faster than they travel; and one has the impression that Americans know so little about their own domain as to believe almost anything they are told. There are, it is true, many books of opinion (mostly adverse) both native and foreign; but Mr. Markey has gone after the concrete reality — gone sixteen thousand miles after it: the way ordinary people live, and talk, and think, the stuff that underlies, or should underlie, the torrent of generalization that is near drowning us all; and he has produced by far the most adequate account I know of. It is a modern Odyssey, tremendously impressive and curiously exciting.
After reading much of the book two or three times J am still wondering how it was written. It ought to be scrappy, and perhaps smart. It is neither, it is unquestionably sincere, and it has a strong unity — which is perhaps firstly that of the self-portrait these pages involuntarily have caught. Mr. Markey, as interlocutor of these scores of unknown people (celebrities are mercifully avoided), emerges pretty clearly as that distinctly American kind of young man who is disillusioned but not cynical, sophisticated but not blasé, romantic but not sentimental. Incidentally, these are qualities that make for a good prose style. But the unity is mainly that of the quest itself; and this in spite of, or because of, the fact that there is no effort to suppress contradictions. For out of these finely etched vignettes of life and land there emerge certain recurrent themes building up and reënforcing each other all through the — poem, I almost wrote. One theme in particular emerges — and I am not going to say here what it is. Its significance, which is profound, consists in its being discovered, as the author discovered it, in all sorts of settings and in the minds of all sorts of people. It is succinctly and quietly stated in two or three pages at the end of the volume; but I doubt whether in all the myriad books about modern America there is anything more convincing, or more important,
WILLIAM ORTON