Imperial City
by
[Coward-McCann, $3.00]
ELMER RICE has taken the metropolis for his new scene in Imperial City. Against the multi-towered backdrop of New York he has pictured — by way of a dramatic novel the passions and hopes, the dreams and desolations, the greeds and corruptions, of the seven million souls that are its lifeblood. In swift, breathless scenes that remind one of a rotating stage, we meet professors, bankers, merchants, actresses, stenographers, aviators, movie stars, psychoanalysts, lawyers, students, artists, writers, pugilists, editors, crooks, policemen, agitators, reporters, Communists, servants, singers, evangelists, and an assorted company of drunkards, Lesbians, and homosexuals.
The complex plot works itself out through the activities and associates of the millionaire Coleman family, through Fanny and through her sons — Christopher, stolid, imperious Wall Street titan; Greg, drunken millionaire playboy; and Gay, likable young Columbia professor. Christopher introduces us to the workings of high (low?) finance, Greg to the Broadway theatrical maelstrom, Gay to the intellectual air of the campus and questions of labor, politics, education.
In the solution of all these problems the characters multiply. Congestion is inevitable, in spite of Mr. Rice’s manipulative skill. So, too, is a want of color and vitality in some of the many portraits. He has brushed personality and pulse into people like Gay and Ruby and Max Klein, but the vitality runs thin in such lesser figures as Hemlock and Clifford Austrian and Perry Kane.
Again, the hand of the playwright becomes a little too obvious in the innumerable linkings of events, in the clash of one character’s experience on another, in the very headline-like nature of the circumstances of the story. Of course, the logic of fiction must always he more severe than that of life, but in the selection and order of events it must still carry the punch of persuasion. Several times in the reading you will he templed to say, ‘How neat,’ ‘How clever,’ ‘How surprising,’rather than the more satisfying ‘How true.'
In the dialogue, as is expected, Mr. Rice moves with consummate skill, from directors’ meetings to trial scenes, from the rough-and-tumble parlance of Ruby and the stage to the suave talk of academics and the sophisticated repartee of free spirits like Mack and Terry. If it is sometimes stagey, at least it is always mature and interesting.
I am of the opinion that Mr. Rice’s next novel should be written not only with a typewriter, but also with a blue pencil. A novel is not just a place to spread oneself out in; for all its hundreds of pages, it can be just as needlessly cluttered as a stage with sets or a play with characters.
All of this is not to say that Imperial City is not worth your time. It most definitely is. In one sense it is a harsh vivisection of the present scene, showing beneath the little surface warts the inner cancers at work on an effete and outmoded social order. It is a condemnation and a challenge. But most readers will welcome Imperial City as a big, action-packed story, a kind of stupendous drama, spectacularly set, cast, and played, with the hundred-fingered puppet-master expertly in motion whether in conference room or rehearsal, in private office or delicatessen store, in brothel or social forum.
CHARLES LEE