Books: Yay, Penrod

THE SHOW PIECE (212 pp.]—Booth Tarkington—Doubleday ($2).

Booth Tarkington was trying to finish this novel when he died last May, aged 76. He had about a third of it still to write. It is now published, unfinished, with an introduction by his widow. She recalls how her husband distinguished what he called "the investigatory novel" from the "escapist" one—and declares that "the truth and mystery of human nature, and how most clearly to tell about that truth and that mystery" were the concern of his mature writing.

Tarkington's Alice Adams won the Pulitzer Prize in...