(4 of 5)
A GOOD WOMAN—Louis Brom-field—Stokes ($2.50). This book were better left unpublished. Coming on the heels of three splendid predecessors, the last of which (Early Autumn, 1926) won a Pulitzer Prize and brought the author back from his European haunts in a triumph of press-agentry, it is a sorry letdown. Florid, artificial, repetitious, it is incredibly dull and sloppy work to come from an author of Mr. Bromfield's well-earned reputation.
It unreels the story of an Ohio boy whose domineering mother married him off young and innocent to a pallid missionary, a virgin before the Lord, called Naomi. In an Africa which Mr. Bromfield must have studied up on lurid picture postcards, Philip Downes revolts against his calling and celibacy. Attacked by bloodthirsty blackamoors, he narrowly escapes with life and wife back to Ohio, where he enters a steel mill and espouses his fellow-workers' cause. Just before they go on a losing strike, he slips off unexpectedly into a career of painting.
To his mother's and Naomi's horror he has learned about drink from the hunkies. To his own horror, he learns about women from Naomi, who bears twins in her effort to hold her man. But he is enamored of Mary Conyngham, widowed sweetheart of his childhood. She installs him in the barn of Shane Castle (the Shane family, bygone royalty of "the Town," being lugged in to connect this book with its predecessors as another "panel" in the Bromfield series). Mary Conyngham is out to rescue Philip from his mother, whose pious meddling caused everyone's woe.
But it is Naomi who resolves the impasse, by eloping suddenly with a sex-starved minister as far as Pittsburgh, where both commit prayerful suicide. This leaves Philip nothing to do but marry Mary and return to expiate something or other on the African postcard scene.
Philip's father, a handsome, slippery little dog named Jason, is brought back from 26 years of supposed death for no better purpose than to furnish comic relief to the sagging last third of the book. At the end he is killed off, by a drunken fall on his return trip to Australia, where he has an informal second wife and family.
Emma Downes the mother, the "good woman," passing at last from her tribulations, marries a Congressman and goes to her grave trailing ironic clouds of Y.M.C.A. glory. The book is named for her and dedicated— to all of her ilk in U. S., "which has more than its share of them.'' It is she that is most to blame for the book's failure. Mr. Bromfield has undoubtedly met the type but he has never, apparently, been sufficiently interested in an Emma Downes to draw of her more than an obvious, uninspired caricature.
Smooth Blend