Animadversions on the Deplorable State of Today
The Story. Old Peter B. Kayne, "pirate emeritus," had piled up a colossal fortune and started his son Rufus where he left off. Thereupon, having got religion and put his rather flushed past as far as possible behind him, he was devoting his senility to the satisfying contemplation of the works he had wrought and to feeding the squirrels in Central Park.
Rufus Kayne, bearing his father's millions lightly, was fond of his wife whenever it occurred to him, and was, in short, an eminently reliable and extremely solvent Babbitt.
The children of Rufus are three—Diana, the eldest, is cold, fascinating, a little cynical, dangles her feet over innumerable precipices, and has always managed to pull them back in time; Claudia, the second daughter, is an instance of war-marriage in haste and equally hasty repentance; the youngest is Sheila, of the jazz age.
The Kaynes are early victims of their generation. Rufus becomes involved in a tangle of bad appearances, bad investments, blackmail, disgrace, resulting in his financial ruin.
Sheila, after a narrow escape from the drug habit, has an even narrower one from a so-called "Butterfly Club " conducted by a sticky Hindu pseudo yogi.
Claudia, after being dramatically rescued from her faithless English spouse, falls in love with her rescuer and is busily engaged in studying the somewhat involved international and interstate divorce laws when the rescuer goes blind and betakes himself to a school for disabled soldiers.
Diana is brought back to normalcy by the spectacle of the tragedy of Sheila. Finally she acquires a complete new soul by the convenient expedient of falling in love with Lloyd Haitian d, a somewhat insistently high-minded young lawyer, through whose disapproving eyes the author watches most of the iniquitous pageant of hip-flasks and jazz.
The end leaves everybody pretty badly off and presumptively the better for it. The catalog of the Kayne misadventures concludes when old Peter, while his house is being sold over his head, succumbs to apoplexy so violently as to rip away a tapestry revealing the words: Except the Lord build the house they labor in vain that build it. Among other things, that is Mr. Train's text.
The Significance. It is a dark world that Mr. Train sees. He is not content with regarding the age as one of irreverence in the very young or stagnation in the very old. He grants freely that the young are irreverent and the old are stagnant. But he goes further. He sees this as an age of decadance, of sham, of sensuality, of materialism.
The field of his Jeremiad is broad. It is something of a technical feat that Mr. Train has managed to juggle three generations, three different plots, and any number of different social criticisms simultaneously.
The Critics. The book has been generally estimated as its author's best novel. Certainly it is his most pretentious. Dr. Henry Van Dyke calls it a "new Vanity Fair" in the course of an extravagant eulogy.