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From now on, the story runs riot. The War ends, Peter returns home, his father relents, he marries Georgina amid a swirl of roses and Rolls-Royces. But something that (to the reader's slightly puzzled intelligence) seems like an attack of amnesia, causes her to drive off in her new Rolls on their wedding night—while her unsuspecting husband sits by the moonlit lake and meditates, and never misses her till morning.
The rest of the story is a dizzying mélange of Peter's wanderings seeking Georgina amid the Bolsheviks in Russia, the Sinn Feiners in Ireland, the Fascisti in Rome, the Ku Kluxers in the U. S. Georgina is continually turning up, conveniently but mysteriously, in the course of his terrestrial ambulations, and ectoplasmically fading from the picture again.
The Significance. In this preposterous extravaganza of modern life, Mr. Cournos has shot his shafts blithely over the whole universe. There is, of course, not much more than a suggestion of the famed original Candide. In fact, the foreword has Candide objecting strenuously to his reincarnation as the son of a pork-packer, Cunegonde worrying about what's going to happen, and Pangloss not quite happy at being made a bootlegger. But this blithe young gravedigger has exhumed their altered corpses with such obvious relish that one has not the heart to quibble with what he has dug up.
The Author. Born at Kiev, Russia, in 1881, John Cournos migrated with his parents to Philadelphia at the age of 10. He was successively factory-hand, newsboy, journalist, author: The Wall, The Mask, Babel. Living now in London, his recreations are: "Reading the Greeks and Elizabethans, watching the folly and wonder of life, playing with pebbles on the beach."
New Books
The following estimates of books much in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion:
ON THE LOT AND OFF—George Randolph Chester—Harper ($2.00). A pleasant picture of the cinema industry as conceived by the average fan. The hero, gifted with a winning smile, infallibility, a flat stomach and gangle shanks, sells his services to "Magnificent Pictures" at an initial salary of one dime per week and progresses in nine years to the dignity of a divorce scandal and his life-long ambition: "Isidor Iskovitch Presents." The story of his rise begins with the assembling of a $10,000-stake from seven Iskovitch uncles blessed with red beards and businesses of the varying styles to be expected from the name, and closes with million-dollar mergers, assisted by the flapper granddaughter of a financial magnate. Izzy marries the flapper, and the villain is shot—anonymously but most satisfactorily—dead. It is an enjoyable story by the late creator of Wallingford and Blackie Daw, but it falls, perhaps, somewhat short of the heights attained by those classic heroes.