FLOOD Robert Neumann Covici, Friede ($3).
Reconstruction in Germany after the War is the subject of this broad-focused novel; as in our own Reconstruction, villainy, graft, murder, vice, hysteria saturate the atmosphere. The central figures of the story inhabit a tenement in a German city; the War whirls them apart; in the guerrilla warfare of peace they are blown together again, but now some are big businessmen, others are professionally criminals, pimps, dope-sellers; some are Communists; the women are shrunken harridans or plumped-up prostitutes. It is a civilization fighting the...