BRIEFER MENTION
In The Bright Shawl (12mo., 220 pages; Knopf: $2) Joseph Hergesheimer has written, and written remarkably well, a straightforward, unpretentious and beautiful romance. It is interesting in relation to his other work, for in other and lovelier skies there reappears the lay Anthony, with all the attractiveness of that character and with the author's greatly increased sophistication of technique to carry him forward. There reappears also the skill in evocation which made the early chapters of Java Head notable. The story is excellent and Mr Hergesheimer's exceptional talents may be judged from the fact that it comes out as Ass story in spite of everything. It is as in Conrad a question of courage; it is as in Meredith a question of brilliance; but when a writer is doing simply and honestly what he wants to do, the influences do not matter. The one flaw in the book is that Mr Hergesheimer does not induce the young hero's sudden determination to die for the liberty of Cuba and for a long time takes no pains to make it creditable; he overcomes this by the extraordinary neatness of his narrative, by flashes of talent, by a certain solid belief in it on his own part. The Bright Shawl is good enough to rescue Mr Hergesheimer even from the compromising position in which Cytherea left him.
Heartbeat, by Stacy Aumonier (12mo, 282 pages; Boni & Liveright: $2) while it does not stand as the highest achievement of its author's pen, is head and shoulders above most of the season's outpour of fiction—an incisive, swiftly-told, and consistent novel, written with grace and vitality. One never remains in any doubt as to what sort of people Mr Aumonier moves across his pages; with crisp and sympathetic strokes he sketches them, and there is not a blurred or wavering line from cover to cover. Character, in the intricate pattern of some of his work, is here subordinated to action, but the narrative is entirely creditable, and squares with life.
The Happy Fool, by John Palmer (12mo, 304 pages; Harcourt, Brace: $2). It is a pity that the verbal teeth in the critical wheel are worn so smooth that they no longer bite in the minds of review readers, for this novel is really "penetrating" and "illuminating," and these now ineffectual adjectives are the only ones to describe it properly. Mr Palmer frequently startles one by his perception and understanding of the subtler motives of human conduct: in his unheralded novel there is a deeper knowledge of life, a more precise comprehension of psychological and emotional forces, than can be found in many touted works by the psychological and psychoanalytic brahmins of the day. And the method is so deceptively easy: there are no torturing, long-drawn operations, no clumsy worrying of helpless characters. Mr Palmer has written a novel which records the complex relationship of a young couple, ideally unsuited to each other temperamentally and socially, who love, marry, and make tragedy and beauty of their lives because their characters, in propinquity, demanded those actions; not because a scheming author willed it.
