Praise and prejudice

The new books in review by George Dangerfield

THE DEAN AT A BARGAIN. The literary landscape in January is bleak and vacant. publishers having prudently gone to ground to meditate upon their spring lists. Consequently, before turning to those few authors who shiver in our thin postChristmas airs, 1 want to report on a volume which came my way too late to mention last month and which is, by all accounts, the best buy in sight. I refer to that selection from the works of Jonathan Swift which Random House, ever the book-lover's buddy, have brought out at the reasonable price of $3.50. Passing up a god-given chance to spend the rest of this page writing about Dean Swift, I can only say that the selection is well made, the text irreproachable, the book compact; and that, when you can get the greatest writer of English prose in such a handsome and handy shape, it would be an unforgivable sin not to go out and acquire him at once.

DARK HORSES. In the otherwise none too alluring January book lists there would seem to be two dark horses, which may or may not get a place in the best-selling lists. The first—a novel called Via Mala by John Knittel—probably won't stay the pace, though; starting off at a swift and splendid gallop, it ends by folding up and practically going to sleep. Laid in a mountainous Swiss canton, it tells you how the Lauretz family, the members of which have all been more or less crippled by a mean and murderous father, gang together and messily dismember him with axes. This may sound like melodrama, but isn't. It is written as one always hopes a novel will be written: beyond and above story and style, there is that inexplicable something which critics are reduced to calling "life", something which comes right out of the page and hits you a shrewd blow beneath the fifth rib. What happened to Mr. Knittel after the murder I cannot tell: perhaps he grew tired; he certainly grows tiresome. His book meanders off into the fortunes of a female sprig of the Lauretz clan called Sylvelie whose marriage with a Swiss aristocrat is nearly ruined by the haunting after-effects of her father's murder. All ends happily; but it shouldn't. The tale should have ended with the murder and the gallows for all the Lauretzes; then it would have been brief and profoundly tragic. As it is, it is long, lop-sided, and alas phlegmatic. (Stokes. $2.50)

ALAS POOR ALEC. Bessie Breuer's Memory of Love is the other dark horse; with a little luck it will be a best-seller. It is written in the first person singular, and tells the misadventures in love of a self-playing, neurasthenic, and remarkably humorless American Don Juan called Alec. Its style is unpleasantly like something George Moore might have contrived, had he been overcome by a lust to imitate Samuel Pepys; yet the story which emerges from it is so passionate, so painful, and so genuine that I can't help feeling that a lot of people will be kept awake over it. That ancient and intolerable farce, of the disappointed male, was never better staged than here. (Simon & Schuster. 82.50)

A CHINESE VACUUM. Those nuggets of wisdom which lay so thick beneath Pearl Buck's The Good Earth never found their way into her other books' thin and faintly evangelical soil. Of her latest novel, A House Divided, I have only space to say that it is the story of young Yuan Wang, who, condemned by Mrs. Buck to live in a polished and practically total vacuum, looks like being the hero of the first literary bust of 1935. But I hope this won't prove true. Like most other people, I'd like to see the author of The Good Earth come through again in a big way. (Reynal and Hitchcock. 82.50)