BOOKS IN BRIEF
Sheridan, Mary
Books In Brief By Mary Sheridan CASS TIMBERLANE, by Sinclair. Lewis (Random House, $2.75). His new novel shows Lewis in a much more mellow mood than the days of Babbitt: Cass, a 41-year-old judge,...
...No major effort, but Mr...
...THREE MEN IN NEW SUITS, by J. B. Priestley (Harper...
...2.50...
...What to do about them is something else again...
...Lewis is tender, for him, with the two leading ladies of the story...
...Marquand is an old hand as a narrator and an impressive reporter...
...It's easy to understand why Lau Shaw is reportedly one of China's most popular writers...
...The details—human minutia of talk, food, and dress—are right and knowing...
...Janeway makes things hum and seem important in New York, Martha's Vineyard, Washington, Ohio, and Connecticut...
...There's an introduction by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings...
...Janeway's second novel is like her The Walsh Girls only in that it's a "psychological" study too...
...THE WHITE TOWER, by James Ramsay Ullman (Lippincott, $3...
...Very much in the modern mood, Daisy Ken-yon is about a career girl's adjustment to herself and marriage after eight years of an affair with an older, rich, Irish Tammany lawyer-fixer (he may make you think of Edward Arnold...
...Ull-man's love of mountains and climbing (he wrote High Conquest) is contagious, and, for all the serious undertones, the book is a different, and refreshing, escape story...
...Even though the story boils down to the personal relationships of some selfish, amoral people (there's an ace characterization of a frustrated wife), Mrs...
...Incidentally, some of Mr...
...How he lost it and was tricked into marriage, h,ow he won self-reliance and lost it, and how he finally gets another chance make a rich and tender book, which is also remarkable for its capture on paper of a city's sounds and sights and magic...
...I DREAM OF THE DAY, by Caleb Milne (Longmans, $2...
...A too long novel with too much mental meandering manages to be exciting because of the mountain climbing action which pervades it...
...His human warmth and humor spark this essentially sad tale of the young Chinese who wanted his own rickshaw...
...A collection of sensitive letters written by a young American serving with the American Field Service in the African campaign...
...RICKSHAW BOY, by Lau Shaw (Reynal & Hitchcock, $2.50...
...Here is a lovingly compiled selection of intellectual fare from philosophers, jurists, statesmen, essayists, poets, and many more...
...Milne was struck and killed by a mortar shell...
...The undertone inTriestley's vivid—and hasty—novel is that the men who fought this war want to come back to an existence better than their pre-war days—and if they don't get that better chance, they'll do something, though they don't know what, to get it...
...His descriptions of foreign terrain and foreign people are unusually good, and one letter, written for his mother in the event of his death, is a beauty...
...His new novel shows Lewis in a much more mellow mood than the days of Babbitt: Cass, a 41-year-old judge, is likeable and often admirable, and Mr...
...DAISY KENYON, by Elizabeth Janeway (Double-day, Doran, $2.50...
...What three English soldiers, from three distinct backgrounds, discover on their return to civilian life poses some unpleasant postwar facts of life...
...Priestley's characters are anything but grateful for America's war role in Britain...
...Cass' devotion to and need for his young wife are plausible—but his best-friend blindness and non-malelike acceptance of his wife's whims aren't credible...
...And not too credible, either, is the preoccupation of all of the characters with nocturnal matters...
...Despite some splashes of over-writing, it is always good reading...
...Marquand is as smooth as velvet in his story telling and vividly graphic in his descriptions of pilots talking, fighting, and relaxing...
...He loves the Minnesota land and climate, but his pen slashes as of old at the marital messes of its citizens —and particularly of its Solid Citizens...
...It has its lighter moments, but it is mainly Deep Stuff...
...While the tawdry marriage is depressing when you start wondering how many "thousands might be like it in real life, the pilot's resilient bounce back is reassuring—and tough...
...A rather sad novelette about a Navy pilot's hasty war marriage...
...His reborn fondness for Minnesota is matched by a bitter scorn for New York City...
...Don't let that scare you, though, for the excerpts show rare taste...
...REPENT IN HASTE, by John P. Marquand (Little, Brown, $1.50...
...THE PRACTICAL COGITATOR, edited by Charles P. Curtis and Ferris Greenslet (Houghton Mifflin, $3...
...He has a genuine sympathy for the individual's glories and foibles...
Vol. 9 • November 1945 • No. 46
