(4 of 4)
MANTRAP—Sinclair Lewis—Harcourt, Brace ($2). For the moment laying aside the loaded knouts with which he has scourged Main Street, Babbitt and the medical profession, Castigator Lewis now swings a cutting quirt upon upholders of "the most blatant of all American myths," namely, Roughing It Like a He-Man in the North Woods. The chief culprit is round, thick, heartily self-satisfied E. Wesson Woodbury, village fatboy grown up to hosiery sales-manager, who backslaps his tired little lawyer-friend Ralph Prescott into taking a canoe trip to Mantrap Landing, upper Canada, and then bully-rags him for a tenderfoot after flies, rain, solitude have dispelled the jimmy-pipe dream.
Trader Joe Easter of Mantrap turns up, the genuine article in quiet He-Men, and it really looks as though the Castigator were going to take a few last slashes at E. Wesson Woodbury and finish the story in unparalleled Open Spaces style. Prescott curses his bumbling tormentor, quits him and goes off with sympathetic Joe Easter. Joe philosophizes with winning rusticity, curbs wild nature with handsome ease and is quite touching about his young wife, a city manicure-girl regenerated by Nature.
But never fear. Castigator Lewis is too full of important messages for mankind to let even this slender opportunity escape him. Joe's little Alverna is soon revealed in her true cosmetics—an incorrigible, shallow flirt, bored stiff by Joe's backwoodsmanhood. She tempts Prescott until he has to run away to save his honor; then she overtakes him and completes the seduction. The runaways are pursued through the wilderness by a forest fire and Joe Easter, the fire hanging back just far enough to make an impressive setting for some sterling heroics by Joe when he catches up. Joe has been cleaned out by tricky Indians and now offers 1) to save his good friend Prescott from foolish Alverna; 2) to commit suicide. After a protracted love-feast, the two men ship Alverna back to Minneapolis, and splendid Joe then pretends to get drunk so that Prescott will see what a mistake it would be to take him to New York and introduce him to cultured friends.
All told, the book is rather a mediocre feat for the celebrated scorner of average men, literary grace, Pulitzer Prizes. The flaying of E. Wesson Woodbury may spoil a great many people's summer vacations, but far more malice could have been wrought, and more sales made, if the ending had not been so tediously dragged out. After paddling far up the stream of U. S. literature, Mr. Lewis has idly turned his canoe and shot some unexciting rapids.
*THE TRAVELS OF MARCO POLO—Edited by Manuel Komroff — Boni, Liveright ($3.50).
†The U. S. brothers Roosevelt (Theodore, Kermit) collected, as everyone knows, specimens of Ovis poli on the Pamir Plateau last summer (TIME, Oct. 12, SCIENCE).
**From hashishin, as the Old Man's followers were called, comes "assassin."
††Colonel Umberto Nobile of the Norge.