Books: Western

BITTER CREEK—James Boyd—Scribner ($2.50).

Nearest that James Boyd has come to a modern novel was his Roll River (1935), a story laid in his home town, Harrisburg, from 1880 to 1920. It is his theory (like that of James Branch Cabell) that good novels cannot be written about the present age; a writer needs "the perspective of years to know what most of it amounts to—if anything." Not because his theory is necessarily correct, but because he has written good U. S. historical romances (Drums, Long Hunt, et al.), readers will be glad that...