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CRUDE—Robert Hyde—Payson & Clarke ($2.50). Into a peaceful California community, modern style, came lure, bustle, intrigue, Gargantuan charlatanry—the discovery of oil. Into the lives of Able and Ressa Dolac, farmer's children, came kiss-weary Duncan Ellsworth and Millicent Manning, products of oil money. Thus propitiously starts twenty-seven-year-old Robert Hyde's first novel, written with variety of style, called, perhaps as a dare to critics, Crude.
The conclusion, well prepared, promising for the author's future writings, is nevertheless badly conceived, badly developed. Duncan, sensualist without conscience, pets and buys Ressa into conjugal felicity. Millicent's choice of poverty with artistic Able is made permanent by the suicide, following oil failure, of her father. Ressa is bright-hued, lovable, loving what Duncan gives her; Able is weak as his watercolors. Yet Millicent, as heroine, can end with no stronger statement to her husband than "Poor Ressa ... she has him— and I have you."
Powerful in oil field vocabulary, Author Hyde wears a beard, runs to matters manual. With his wife he personally built their stone house on the Hudson; he must have won his derrick talk with his hands. He knows less the argot of backseat petting; Duncan annoys with cinema wisecracks, explosive approbations like "Gorgeous girl!" Never out of Hollywood was such amorous preparation before Duncan" and Millicent "kissed a long, warm, wet kiss."
Young Stevenson
THE CAP OF YOUTH—John A. Steuart—J. B. Lippincott ($2.50). "After many years and in the fullness of his powers Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the story of his great early love. For reasons which need not be stated here it was not then, and cannot now be published. Hence this story." So explains Author-Historian John A. Steuart, turning from scientific biography* to fiction, producing sentimentally The Cap of Youth.
It presents a youthful Stevenson entirely preferable to the earnest boy of high-school textbooks, scribbling and burning like a pedant for style. Gay, sick, roistering in the face of death, Louis meets Katie Drummond, his Highland lassie, in a barroom, thereby incurs parental dismissal, plans to fling forbidden marriage in the older generation's face. Katie is too good at heart, however. She will not defy God and Church. She retires to the Highlands to wait vainly for a Louis who is to die far away.
Lady and Gentians
YELLOW GENTIANS AND BLUE— Zona Gale—Appleton ($2).