There Is Today

THE novels of Josephine Lawrence immediately raise the question that Howells and James debated, on a higher level but without definite answer, a long time ago: Is it possible to make good fiction out of the unhighlighted commonplace, the completely representative? The question can only be posed here, but it must be posed because Miss Lawrence herself poses it with every paragraph.

On one level this is a pure woman’s-magazine story of a normally happy, normally sensitive, normally brave couple who grew up in a generation cheated first by depression and then by war, and who try to make what normal middle-class happiness they can, for as long as they can, out of the fragments. It has all the interior decoration and costuming of such novels; it appears to accept without question that feminine world of dress and domesticity that seemed to Havelock Ellis so little, so “paleolithically ancient,” so pathetic.

Yet at the same time there is a sense of reality here, an understanding of the desires and dreams and thoughts and acts of the everyday white-collar American that must be honored. Everything, including the writing, is keyed to the level of the average, and somehow it sticks in the mind as important. Miss Lawrence is either very representative or very clever. I am not sure that it matters which. W.S.