Books: Companion for a Plutocrat

AN AMERICAN HERO—F. W. Bronson— Farrar & Rinehart ($2). There are two kinds of irony, intellectual and visceral. Irony from the stomach is the rarer, and when it is applied by a young writer to his own time there are few literary veins more satisfying. Author Bronson’s “hero” is apparently an amalgam of the potentialities of different young men he knew at Yale, melted down into a character as thoroughly “American” as Booth Tarkington’s Plutocrat. Jonathan (“Johnny,” “O. K.”) Green is a redheaded, good-natured ruffian from a small town in Pennsylvania. His ability to smash chins and football lines while not indulging his other animalisms too much to spoil the main chance, gets him into a good college, into Wall Street, big money, a sound marriage. A mixup with a girl to whom he turns not for sex but, more subtly, as an outlet for his vulgarity, leads to divorce, dissipation, bankruptcy. And then the muscular, go-getting, self-preservative qualities of Johnny Green come into play again. Through a rich but sallow girl whom he never quite wrongs, he climbs up again, richer than ever, politically popular, a grinning, driving top-dog with regrets but no remorse, and plenty of strong-man excuses, for his past. His wife comes back to him and the story leaves him making political capital out of his vulgar, underbred mick of a son by his first wife (a loyal little shop girl). Author Bronson handles the return of Junior Green & wife like a straight-harmony writer, reintroducing the original theme to shade, sour and yet enrich the final chord. More, he makes the bareness of his story, the concavity of his omissions, act as a sounding board for the overtone of irony.