BOOKS
THE
COLLECTIVE NOVEL
AND QuiET
FLOws
THE
DoN..
h}• Mikhail Sholokhuv. Alfre·d ,1. Knopf,
New York.
$3.00.
The type of novel loosely called "epic"-the story of a time and
place, rather than an individual or small group of individuals-seems
foreign to Americans. There are a number of American writers, notably
Dos Passos, who have vividly documented our times; but they have done
this by telling the stories of persons, whose only fundamental link one
to the other is the time element. There have, it is true, been attempts–
a healthy number recently, I believe-to tell the ;tory of a community,
one of which,
As The Earth Turns,
made a stir a year or so ago.
As The Earth Turns
tells of the life of a large farm fam1ly which
is practically a community, over a period of one year. There was birth,
marriage, death, love, hate, all the elements that go to make up life on
a Maine farm, or, for that matter, an East Side tenement.
It
was a
book the very simplicity of which was a slighf'ly false simplicity, the whole
book was colored by a sort of perverted sentimentality peculiar to many
otherwise honest American writers; but it was an adequate book.
Then I took up
And Quiet Flows The Don,
and was shocked by the
thinness of
As The Earth Turns
and its like; and it seemed to me that,
although Americans have produced many good books, and some fine books,
we as yet are apparently incapable of producing a. novel of great breadth.
If
this is so, what's the answer? Is the fact that our best canvasses
show only two or three vivid figures against a hazy or neutral background
due to a tradition of "rugged individualism," or to our long-advertised
youthfulness (arrested development by this time if true, which it isn't)
or simply to the fact that we haven't got the time? (
G<lt
to turn out a
book a year or your publishers wilt loose interest, you won't cash in on
last year's publicity, readers will forget you, your friend s will start shaking
heads). My vote is for the last; tO\ face a job the finish of which must
be
several years away is heart-breaking to an American.
Not that
And Quiet Flows The Don
has not been equalled and per–
haps surpassed in merit by American works. It is just that since
Huckle–
berry Finn
and Walt Whitman, .in no American work I have read have
I felt the sweep of our sweeping America, or even a good-sized section
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