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modestly indicating that his career was due to "accidents in ,business
organizations," personally endorses the Horatio Alger myth, at least "in
the symbolic sense." He thinks "the views of one business man" might
"mirror the whole of America" and so, as a "medium," he writes this
book for you. His view of America is about as real as the image he
presents of himself. Thomas' view has the polemical accuracy of one who
takes upon himself the sufferings of the merciless world. Bingham is
usually somewhere in between.
c.
WRIGHT MILLS
ENCHANTED SCENE
THE WOMEN ON THE PORCH.
By
Caroline Gor
1
don. Charles
Scribner's Sons.
$2.50.
C
AROLINE GoRDoN is an accomplished writer, in whose finest work,
.such as, for instance, her admirable long story, "The Captive," are
qualities some of her colleagues might well envy and emulate; an ease
and directness with language, a strict control of tone, a holding to a
narrative line with no showy intrusions of stylistic acrobatics or the ex–
tended irrelevant free play of sensibility, that marks a very pure kind
of writing. But in her latest novel Miss Gordon has set herself a task
to which her natural equipment is not as well keyed.
To open this book to almost any page is to· find, in some straight–
forward or evocative description, some delineation of what on the stage
is called "business," or account of a conversation, the mark of a crafts–
man's hand. We may find nothing to astonish, but a great deal to please.
In the whole picture, many of these passages, rich, luminous, sharp as
they may be, unhappily seem too often fortuitous, distracting to the
point of being detrimental both to the design and spirit of the novel.
It is true that we are under an obligation to Miss Gordon to hold our–
selves down to the pace she has set for herself, and the fact that we may
be accustomed to a more nervous tempo is no fault of this novelist's,
whose entire method here is one of understatement and quiet implica–
tion, but we must not therefore fail to inquire, as we go, whether she
has used this method to the best purpose, and for the best reasons; whe–
ther all the patience that is required of us is to be fed by the necessary
spring of sufficiently meaningful interest.
The derangement of human relations, the tragedy of failure, the
treachery of circumstance, all have enough mystery to engage a writer
forever. We have no wish and no right to quarrel with a set of charac–
ters .or situations because they are cas.t in a familiar mold, which we
are prepared to meet easily with a critical vocabulary that includes ex–
pressions like frustration, maladjustment, defeatism, ambivalence. The
novelist is required, however, to be more than the historian of such cases,
