HOUSE OF ALL NATIONS—Christina Stead—Simon & Schuster ($3).
Christina Stead is a 35-year-old Australian novelist who has been a critics' favorite, a popular failure. According to Rebecca West she is "one of the few people really original we have produced since the War." According to Clifton Fadiman she is "the most extraordinary woman novelist produced by the English-speaking race since Virginia Woolf." If readers ignore her latest novel, House of All Nations, they will have to do so in the way a pedestrian ignores a landslide in the road—by walking around it.
House of All Nations brings up to date the theme of Balzac's La Comedie Humaine. Our epoch, said Balzac, is one in which "money is the lawgiver, socially and .politically," when, for money, "people fight and?devour one another like spiders in a pot." Running to 795 pages, told in 104 cinematic scenes, House of All Nations takes for its pot the luxurious Paris private bank of Bertillon & Cie., described by its head, elegant, cynical, lucky, grandly deluded Jules Bertillon, as "a rich man's club: a gambling, deposit and tax-evasion bank ... a society dump" doing business in "grapples, clinches, blackmails, plunges, lucky breaks, long odds, lowdowns, big gambles, and secret bookkeeping."
In the pot, under Author Stead's high-powered microscope, there are 125 assorted spiders—brokers, customers' men, blackmailers, toadies, shysters, Packingtown countesses, Blue Coast playboys, a bank glamor-girl, a society medium. But although every nation has its representative, the fighting is not on nationalistic lines. "No rich man," says Jules Bertillon, "is a patriot, no rich man a friend. They have all only got one fatherland—the Ritz-Carlton; and one friend—the mistress they're promising to divorce their wife for." Some of the spiders:
¶ Bitter Economist Michel Alphendery, a communist sympathizer, who says of his job: "We're riders of the storm: all of us together with him in this phantom bank, built on misery, shining out of mire, solid in an earthquake, soundproof in thunder, a living lightning conductor: an accident in capitalism."
¶ A religious, powerful London broker, who prompts Jules's observation that "the English are not hypocritical. . . . They have a natural, ingrained double face from birth! They're the Western Chinese: old and smooth with deceit."
¶ A rich Argentine, about whom, when he is assassinated, Bertillon philosophizes: "Tigers are hard to catch: thank God the world has one less!"
¶ A fat, whining customers' man, who, coached by his coldblooded, canny wife, worms his way into the bank, plays the Black Widow that finally gobbles up the overconfident Bertillon.
¶ Most spectacular of the bunch, a near-genius creation of canniness, stupidity, bombast and lust, is the half-articulate Rumanian Jew, Grain-broker Henri Leon, whose "deposit technique" marks the perfect blend of speculation and double-crossing. When Leon has a love affair with a smart Hollywood adventuress, he incorporates the partnership as the Margaret Trust, of which he holds 49% of the shares.