(5 of 5)
For years Mr. Gibbs has not omitted the War from his novels. He feels that humanity's lesson will bear everlasting repetition. He is an excellent journalist, and one of the best features in this latest assignment is his verbal photography of Soviet Russia. But what is selling the book is not preaching or photography, nor the story, which differs little from what happens to most English families in War novels. Katherine Lambert is the person that pulls you. English idealist, she married middle-aged Prince Serge Detloff and spent all her youth and beauty helping to bring about the "bloodless" revolution in Russia that became so ironically sanguinary. Their son, Michael, and the gyp-yesque daughter Dorothy of Katherine's bacteriologist brother Paul, furnish a tense, vivid, very human secondary action in the second generation. The "quest," of course, is for peace, love, God.
Vestal
APPASSIONATA—Fannie Hurst— Knopf ($2). Leading bookstores report this book second in demand only to Unchanging Quest out of all fiction published this year. It is the story of a little Manhattan colleen, Laura Regan, upon whom a ceinture de chastité is bound hard and fast, constitutionally, by her convent training, and by the despair of her child-weary sister Fleta. Her brother Frank, an "advanced" young man, fails to awaken her curiosity or appetites with his readings from Freud, Jung, Joyce & Co. She is saved from the dreaded consummation of marriage with big, blond, rich Dudley Streeter by the capsizing of his roadster, the fracture of her shoulder and, later, Dudley's being caught kissing her nurse. The one man she might have been able to take, Asfurth Ropps, comes too late, too insistently. She kneels to her Saviour and prays for a wimple. With great pertinacity but somewhat burdensome effect, Miss Hurst tells it all in the form of a long, impressionistic address to the girl herself.
*THE INTIMATE PAPERS OF COLONEL HOUSE—Charles Seymour, Editor—Houghton, Mifflin— 2 vols. ($10).
*Except those from Woodrow Wilson. Mrs. Wilson has not yet given permission to publish any of her late husband's letters, but Professor-Editor Seymour saw those to Colonel House, translated their sense to his pages.
**Divorced in 1908, the Countess appealed to the Tsar of Russia for custody of her daughter Felicia, married Elmer Schlesinger, Manhattan lawyer, in 1925. Count Gyzicki died last month in Germany.
† Only one Wyoming ex-Senator is now living: Clarence Don Clark, 1895-1917. It should be stated that, though Countess Gyzicka mentions by name many a real Senator—Curtis, the late Lodge, Pepper, Wheeler, Walsh, Heflin, Moses and Borah —her "Bob Millar" is drawn from none of these, nor from Wyoming ex-Senator Clark.