(5 of 5)
The Significance. This not only should be but probably will be one of the celebrated novels of the year. The author's real desire to interest, inform, amuse and move her reader is felt and fulfilled without visible effort. There is wit, grace, fine feeling and a style which, while lively, never begs applause. The people are so real that there will be endless discussion of who is actually who: Sculptor St. George is Sculptor Saint-Gaudens, and so on. If the fabrication of fictitious letters and other personalia are remarkable, the character relations are even more so, especially the courteous, humorous, almost tender friendship between the divorced senior Lords. There is no "diddle-diddle-dumpling" about My Son John. After the prevailing diet of pink-tea fiction, John Lord and his story are strong, black coffee.
The Author. E. B. Dewing, daughter of artistic Anglo-Manhattan parents, privately educated, was not very old when she presented herself to a startled publisher as the author of Other People's Houses, a novel which he was eager and fortunate to publish. That was 17 years ago when girls just out of their teens simply did not write novels, let alone good ones. She carried the thing further with A Big Horse to Ride (1911) and queened it in all the studios that counted. Then, abruptly, she stopped writing,. married and went out to Washington, to raise hogs and struggle with a husband of whom the less said the better. She bore two girls. The valley was a weird one, thinly settled with religious fanatics, half-breed Indians, escaped murderers. Not for three years did she return to New York, free again, with her girls to support. She worked on newspapers and the stage. She met and married Carl Bender, a Danish artist, who sympathized with her instinct for writing and encouraged the project of her present work. The New York to which she goes back in its pages is the New York of her girlhood, speculatively remembered. That she had lately to send Mr. Bender home to Denmark, an incurable invalid, did not lighten her labors. The Dewing girls, Mary and Elizabeth Ann, attend a Manhattan convent of English nuns.
* MOHAMMED—R. F. Dibble—Viking Press ($3). * Last year there were in the world:
Christians 566,201,000 Confucionists & Taoists 301,155,000 Mohammedans 219,030,000 Hindus 210,400,000 Animists 136,325,000 Buddhists 135,161,000
* MY SON JOHN—E. B. Dewing—Minton, Balch ($2).