It Is Still the Morning

THE story of the fumbling genius growing up in a Middle Western town, to the bewilderment of his conventional relatives, has been retold by Mr. Danz with more humor than is usual in the Peoria-to-Paris formula. Georgie is a painter who paints what he feels. His struggles with a world which fails to see that you paint a horse with five legs so that it can run faster are understandably numerous. Mr. Danz’s most notable achievement is in making Georgie’s ability, his passionate concentration on painting, perfectly convincing, so that the reader has no doubt that Georgie is an artist.

The story is told almost entirely through vivid, authentic conversation, and the characters have all the comic charm which arises from an accurate record of ordinary human confusion. Mr. Danz’s attempts to reproduce Georgie’s vague memory and time sense in prose occasionally suggest Gertrude Stein, but his style is by no means so extraordinary as the total absence of punctuation leads one to suspect at first glance.