Books: Two for the Show

WILD Is THE RIVER—Louis Bromfield —Harper ($2.50).

SARATOGA TRUNK — Edna Ferber—. Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

These new novels by Edna Ferber (who writes-just-like-a-man) and Louis Bromfield (who writes almost like one) have three things in common: both use New Orleans, both will sell well, and both are so predigested for celluloid that they hardly sit still on the page. But one of them is pretty good, and the other pretty bad.

Wild Is the River, which has the largest advance sale of any Harper novel in ten years, tells of Civil War New Orleans under...