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PASSIONS SPIN THE PLOT — Vardis Fisher—Caxton & Doubleday, Doran ($2.50). If the last two volumes of his tetralogy are on a par with the first two (In Tragic Life—TIME, July 3; Passions Spin the Plot}. U. S. critics will be speaking of Idaho's Author Vardis Fisher in the same breath with Indiana's Theodore Dreiser. No less doggedly candid than Dreiser but a more artful writer, Author Fisher intends his four-decker novel to be an honest book. Because he has had a hard, unhappy life and because he writes only of what he knows, Vardis Fisher's books are not cheerful reading, have been called brutal, ruthless. Strong stomachs will find them tough meat but untainted. In Tragic Life brought Vridar Hunter through his unhappy childhood and terrified adolescence in the Idaho hills. Passions Spin the Plot finds him. a gangling youth of 19, on his way to Wasatch College in Salt Lake City. Though college has always been his dream of escape from the poverty-ridden nightmare of farm life. Vridar is very homesick. At first college seems wonderful, in spite of the grimy furnace room he inhabits, the scarecrow clothes he has to wear, the scanty food and few friends. Gradually his high idealism is undermined and he begins to see college as a picture of an unjust and meaningless world outside. "Forenoon" McClintock, a rapscallion fellow-roomer in Vridar's boarding house, helps to complete his disillusioning education. "Forenoon," a devil with the women, is always after Vridar to join him in his forays. But Vridar considers himself engaged to easy-going Neloa Doole at home. Besides, when he gets near a girl he begins to shake. When he hears that Neloa has been going around with other men. however, he does his best to emulate "Forenoon," but has no luck. Home for the summer, he finds that Neloa still loves him, according to her lights, but has indeed bestowed her favors on several casual callers. Vridar nearly goes crazy, tries to break with her but can not. Back at college as a vengeful enemy of society, he gets drunk, steals groceries, cheats landladies, goes to dance halls with his pal "Forenoon." Though he does his earnest best as a seducer, something al ways pulls him up short. Suddenly he drops college, goes home to Neloa and after an agonizing struggle marries her in the full knowledge that he is a fool and the future is hopeless. The Author, like his hero, is the son of Idaho pioneer farmers and went to college in Salt Lake City (University of Utah), later taking his Ph. D. at the University of Chicago. During his first year in high school Fisher wrote a novel, had sense enough to burn it. At Chicago one of his instructors, Professor-Novelist Robert Herrick, advised him to eschew literary ambitions, told him he would never "write a novel worth opening." Fisher made better sense when, after boiling the pot by teaching English for several years at Utah and New York Universities, he went back to Idaho to write. His first novel, Totters of the Hills, got a good press, few sales. When his tetralogy began to appear no Eastern publisher would touch it. Idaho's Caxton Printers, Ltd. brought it out, critics sat up & took notice, and Doubleday, Doran then came in as co-sponsors of it. At 38, a widower with two sons, grimly earnest Vardis Fisher is again teaching English (at University of Montana). His summers