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Lapping up the adulation of her new post as high priestess, Irma is none too happy when Sam takes sick and the mission board orders the couple home for a test. To invoke her return, the natives toss hundreds of piglets into the volcano and finally even their own infants. Sure enough, back in Vermont Sam dies, and Irma heads for the island again.
Everybody is overjoyed. The natives have lost most of their children, are half-Christian, but have their virgin goddess Irma has lost her husband, is half-pagan but has the adoration she loves As for Author March, he has had the pleasure of some deft ironic thrusts, at the expense of almost everybody but the reader nography of irrelevant chatter, its sleep-enticing rhythms, its delight in obsessive enumeration of uninteresting objects, and its aggravating tone of false naivete.
Gertrude Stein began as a literary innovator, helping to break the crusts of conventional literary language. But she took her experiments too seriously and, like many another pioneer, refused to budge from her first discovery. Her manner became a mannerism, her breakthrough a limitation. In her last novel, the old revolutionary proves a rather garrulous bore.