Books: Fourteenth & Final

THE SEVENTH OF OCTOBER (295 pp.)—Jules Romains, translated by Gerard Hopkins—Knopf ($3).

Put out more flags; this is the end.

Jules Romains’ colossal super-novel, Men of Good Will, has at last ground to a wordy stop, after 14 volumes (the original French runs to 27), some 7,500 pages, and about 1,000 characters.

The most grandiose literary project of a generation, introduced to the U.S. public more than a dozen years ago (TIME, June 5, 1933), Men of Good Will has been admired from a safe distance by many, praised to the skies by a few, actually read in its entirety by still fewer. It stands as a monument to the almost incredible industry and endurance of Novelist Romains and his readers. A vast, inchoate panorama, as broad as all Europe and 25 years long, its net effect is more nearly that of a giant notebook than of a novel.

Many of the individual chapters are subtly, brilliantly managed; here & there (as in Vol. VIII, entitled Verdun) they blend into a more or less related whole. But ordinarily Author Romains moves his characters about by whim or wind, endows his chance encounters, political musings, philosophic sermons, fancy seductions with no more apparent interrelation than that of news stories in the daily press.

Author Romains once explained that the grand strategy of Men of Good Will was to “reflect a whole generation.” That it does, as faithfully, as arbitrarily and almost as indiscriminately as a mirror set up in a public square. The Seventh of October takes its title from the last day in Romains’ logbook, in Paris in 1933. Citizens yawn, rise, go to work. A girl visits her lover. An Englishman blushingly discusses sex. A priest talks about politics. Poincaré is ill, the U.S. debt is unpaid, Hitler is kicking up a row in Germany, and 25 years ago is 2,500,000 words away.