Follow the Leader

By Clyde Brion Davis

THE special quality of Mr. Davis’s novels is a mixture of artlessness and irony. The artlessness is on the surface and produces an effect of humor without exaggeration. The irony is submerged and is far from being funny. In this fine novel, against a background of world events between 1899 and 1941, we have the life of Charles Martel of Pabuloma, Missouri; and the irony begins with his very name, for he is the complete antithesis of the Hammer who defeated the Arabs in 732. In a marvelous imitation of a write-up of him in Time, he is called a Padded Hammer. He is an extraordinarily ordinary boy, homely, timid, the victim of adenoids and earache, who “follows” his mother and, when grown, his press agent, to become an industrial magnate and national figure. In the World War, by following himself, he becomes by chance also a national hero. Mr. Davis never hates his characters, as so many contemporary realists do; and the result is that we believe in them. R. M. G.