THE BRIDEGROOM GOMETHWaldo FrankDoubleday, Doran ($2.75).
Waldo Frank, 47, is an inverted Theodore Dreiser, a modern transcendentalist, a mystical Marxist. He is also, at times and in spots, a forceful novelist. Combining passion and penetration with plodding Joycean prose and purblind bookishness, he is a perfect layer cake of the admirable and the irritating.
His best book because it is his clearest and most interesting, The Bridegroom Cometh "dramatizes [says Frank] in flesh and blood the loss of the religious instinct in modern American life, and both the need and the promise of its...