Miss Condon

ALTHOUGH it can hardly be described as a good novel, this account of sin and retribution in New York at the turn of the century has considerable interest as an example of the Hollywood-influenced book. Reading it is precisely like sitting through one of those movies known to the trade as “a woman’s picture.” The heroine is a beautiful lady who commits amiable misdemeanors in an atmosphere of extreme luxury. The circumstances of the crime are so pleasant, in fact, that one is almost able to ignore the punishment.

Jennie Condon Ames is married to a doting but elderly theatrical producer. (One is tempted to call him an impresario.) Charlie Ames takes his young wife to Paris. She becomes bored and goes off on a solitary excursion to Italy, where innocent Americans, from Hawthorne’s day to this, have come to no good. Jennie is no exception. She falls in love with a priggish youth from Maine. The rest of the book is devoted to her attempts to rectify an uncommonly intricate error.

Aline Bernstein treats this plot with the respect due a still serviceable antique. She provides Jennie with a background and a character which make her actions plausible. Her description of the hot, deserted Italian summer resort is convincing. Jennie, at times, moves and speaks like a real woman. Even her punishment, which is confined to her own mind, has a certain subtlety of conception.

It is the construction of the book, and the portrayal of the subsidiary characters, that make Miss Condon something for the matinee trade. All the men in the story, from the Down-Easter who woos Jennie with idealistic talk about the poor, to the Italian priest who comforts himself with Kentucky rye, are either stereotypes flattering to the feminine ego, or fat bits for a good character actor. The women are the reliable old-maid confidante, the ambitious cat and Jennie herself, the bewitching, not quite responsible creature who is, of course, the reader in disguise.

No scene is too important to be interrupted for descriptions of clothes, jewelry, furniture, and bric-a-brac, all of them, it must be admitted, done well. People appear and fade away without reason. Although most of the action is seen through Jennie s mind, her reveries are punctuated by episodes of which she could not be expected to know anything. Finally, while Jennie is never displayed in an indelicate pose, by an odd piece of transferred action one is shown an actress, otherwise quite unrelated to the story, attempting the seduction of one Dan Rosen, who has nothing to do with the main course of events either.

All these matters should make Miss Condon painful reading, but they do not. The narrative rolls along at a fast clip, the writing is easy, and the conversation, in its less emotional moments, very good. Approached in the same spirit in which one attends the Bijou of a Saturday night, the book becomes decidedly entertaining.

PHOEBE LOU ADAMS