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The Significance. Channeled and sped by a masterful artist, the intense lives of Leah and Eli deepen into profound currents that bear all the sorrows of their tragic, ritual-fed race. The rocks that split them, darkly inevitable, grip into the beds of their courses with roots that were when first men and women searched their souls. Told in fierce words and gentle, dull words and shining, words sweet as wild honey, words bitter as black gall—here is a Book.
The Author. In famed Manchester ("Doomington") Grammar School, Louis Golding was precocious among prodigies. At Queen's College, Oxford, he was an ostentatious aesthete, a mincing pedestrian with yellow hair all abroad and much thin-piping, decadent erudition. His poems and essays of the period (1919-22) run salt and shallow. Then he settled in the Tyrol, wandering north into Germany, south to Capri and Sicily. Seacoast of Bohemia (1924) gave evidence of a poseur shedding his false skins. Now, at 29, he seems to have written out of his bones.
Galsworthy
CARAVAN—John Galsworthy—Scribner. ($2.50). Novels, especially the long, sober kind Mr. Galsworthy writes, are stately vehicles riding by the public view. Here is a more informal procession of tales and sketches in which, for a very modest fare indeed, one may go forth on 56 different excursions, in many directions and at the many paces that a writer hits up between his crisp youth and reflective middle age.
Happy Endings
THE GOOSE WOMAN—Rex Beach— Harper ($2.00). A goose-raising, gin-drinking onetime prima donna nearly earns her son a hanging by inventing evidence in a murder case just to see her name in the newspapers again.
A Michigan school kid soaks the town plutocrat in the ear with an iceball, is forgiven. Years later, in Yukon goldfields, he succors the old man, wins daughter.
An amiable vagrant plays Nick-Carter-to-the-rescue of a nearly-swindled oil heiress in the cactus belt.
Marcel the valet took cruel punishment in an Alaskan camp until he innocently shot four huge bears and taught the foreman la savate (pedal boxing).
Grand yarn-spinner though he is, Author Beach never on any account saves a tart twist for the end.
Glossy Puppets
THE PLEASURE BUYERS—Arthur Somers Roche — Macmillan ($2.00). The creatures of Author Roche step right out of the more lustrous cosmetic, hosiery, neckwear and tobacco advertisements of our day—glossy-skinned puppets gliding through syncopated situations with all the smooth perfection that the Roche trade-mark guarantees. Herein the plot clots around a Palm Beach super-sheik with four yachts (named for the four winds), a pugilist-butler and a string of seductions that would put Casanova back in the kindergarten. Also present: a wronged War hero, a guileless moth, a seasoned misconductress. Who daggered the super-sheik ?
*DAY OF ATONEMENT—Louis Golding— Knopf ($2.50).