Light Fiction

IN Zona Gale’s Light Woman (Appleton-Century, $2.00) is the very best sort of comedy, sharp, mature, laughable, but also thoughtful. It is so neatly turned that it could be made into a three-act play with very little trouble — Act 1: Mitty decides to visit Nick’s folks as his wife, though she is not his wife; Act II: She is accepted by his plain, likable, honest family as sister and daughter, with serious consequences that her flighty head has never foreseen; Act III: She appears to realize the consequences; though no one can possibly tell with Mitty whether any realization is permanent.

Perhaps the plot is a shade too neat for complete credibility, but it is great fun. Miss Gale’s somewhat solemn little prologue, however, calls Mitty ‘a woman in a quest for change who resists perception and all the sources of enjoyment allied to insight; a woman who unerringly celebrates the mediocre.‘ But it would be a mistake to conclude that Mitty herself is mediocre, except morally. She is piquant, lovely to look at, exasperating, appealing, as unpredictable as a kitten, as unmoral as a puppy, spoiled but not malicious, and totally unable to see herself except as an interesting dramatic spectacle. The idea that what she does should be in any way governed by its effect on others has never entered her pretty head. ‘You think you’re modern,’ says Nick, ‘but you‘re as old-fashioned as Eve.’ It was a very artful device of the author to throw her into the midst of a family such as she has never known, in which mutual obligations and the observance of some sort of general code of honor is so ingrained as to he merely natural.

The depiction of a ‘light woman.‘ in both the sense Nick’s mother has in mind and the sense Miss Gale has, is so true that one welcomes each new touch with delight; and yet it is no better than the depiction of grave and upright Matthew Beldon; his wife, who thinks she manages her family; his daughter Anne, crippled but brave; his other daughter Genevieve, commonplace and domestic; Grandma, so happy in her delusions; and Billy, the adolescent, idealist. In a novel so short (it is hardly .30,000 words), it requires a very mature art to make every sentence tell, and vet to avoid bareness. In this difficult feat of brevity it runs its rapid course with unerring sureness; and the surface comedy never wholly hides the serious meaning beneath. This meaning Matthew expresses near the end. Speaking to Mitty, he says: ‘You said “I do what I think and they must make the best of it.” That’s what you said. Maybe it’s just such talk that’s helped to wreck the world that you despise. And it‘ll wreck this new world of yours, if you don’t take care!‘ I am glad, however, that Miss Gale let her ‘pretty particle.‘ as she calls her, shine for a while and did not quench her with too heavy an extinguisher.

R. M. GAY