Books: Fiction Tricks

WHEN NIGHT DESCENDS—Edgar Calmer—Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

WHERE THE WEAK GROW STRONG— Eugene Armfield—Covici, Friede ($2.50).

Experiments in fiction have a double-acting influence. When they succeed, as Joyce succeeded in Ulysses, in enabling the author to state truths that could not be expressed in a traditional form, they encourage a thousand writers to work in the same field. When they fail, as Wyndham Lewis failed in The Childermass, the unread wreckage serves to warn later writers away from that intellectual reef.

Within the last fortnight two ambitious fictional experiments by young U. S.

novelists seemed...