BRIEFER MENTION
Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis (12mo, 401 pages; Harcourt, Brace: $2) is an encouraging phenomenon for it starts dully and disastrously with the description of a good Rotarian, a heavy-footed seriously-conceived portrait doing in the manner of Bouvard et Pécuchet what should be done and has been done (Mr Benchley's Nine to Five; To the Ladies; various columnar conversations) with a hard and brittle brightness. Form letters, advertisements, six-page conversations about prohibition, evangelical sermons by Mike Monday, all are put in, head first. And out of this, about two-thirds way through the book, Mr Lewis gets down to the business of writing a novel with created characters and very nearly pulls it off. Babbitt ceases to be a transcript of what the young intellectual portrays as the tired bourgeois and for better or worse, as far as realism is concerned, becomes a person. It is by that time too late for the reader to shake off the consuming effect of Mr Sinclair's documentation and observation and intellectualism; he can only wonder what the author's emotion must have been when he discovered that his principal character had a soul. It is a much better book than Main Street. Mr Sinclair's way of presenting surfaces is exceedingly persuasive and his capacity for avoiding the underlying truth held out long enough. He ought to re-write Babbitt as a novel all the way through, for the root of the matter may be in him.
Mary Lee, by Geoffrey Dennis (12mo, 442 pages; Knopf: $2.50) is, like Crime and Punishment and Sons and Lovets, an almost unbearable book. Not that it has anything in common with these two—except its unusual capacity to communicate intensity of feeling to the reader. It is the story of a little girl brought up by "Saints"—one of the most fanatical of English Protestant sects, flourishing in the middle of the last century. Outwardly, her history is often so ghastly, and yet felt as so unescapably true, that it almost breaks the reader's nerve. The inside Mary is the more real. The inside Mary—who fostered two selves within her for the sake of company, who had only herself with whom to act magnificent dramas of hate and revenge and love and adoration, who was unceasingly haunted by fear of her torturers, of her own human impulses, and, worst of all, by the terror of living forever—a terror that forced her again and again "to think eternity out" to the verge of madness. It seems incredible that the story of this Mary, drab, ecstatical, odd, entirely human, should not be autobiographical—incredible until one remembers that autobiographical novels are not written with the economy and the self-control of this book.
For Richer, For Poorer, by Harold H. Armstrong (8vo, 308 pages; Knopf: $2) is "entirely free from the ramifications of sex." It is just the story of the marriage of two people, good normal Americans, without any sex. Not sexless, of course, because that would sound too Freudian, or continental. Mr Armstrong displays the same intention of keeping close to the flesh of his subject, but the skeleton he has hastily articulated is a meagre affair.
