by Arnold Bennett. New York: George H. Doran. 1922. 12mo, 313 pp. $1.75
Mr. Prohack is a light-hearted and lightweight satire on the vanity of riches and the weaknesses of human beings. If it is true that the test of a novel’s excellence is its power to touch the sense of recognition, Mr. Prohack should be most excellent; for it not only touches that sense but smites it. The psychology of the head of the Prohack family causes the readerecestasies of recognition— his pride and delight in his wife Eve and his daughter Sissie, and the amused male tolerance with which he suffers their extraordinary foibles; his detestation of the monocled Ozzie, with whom Sissie obviously enjoys dancing, and his dismayed discovery that he is beginning to like Ozzie in spite of himself; his panic, on the evening when his wife comes home late, gradually gaining upon his assurance that nothing can ‘happen’ in the Prohack family; above all, his emotions on the supreme occasion when he is indisposed and the doctor is called. However, Mr Bennett shows, not for the first time, that a very intensity of realism is quite a different matter from an effect of reality. In this novel, his fondness for the impish quirk and the fantastic situation and character nullifies the truth, always amusing and sometimes touching, of the earlier chapters. From the beginning, the comedy borders on farce; toward the end, it is wholly submerged in farce. Mr. Prohack’s preposterous son, Charlie; his resourceful secretary, Mimi, with her joyous and perfectly unscrupulous loyalty; and such episodes as that of ‘the silent tower’ and that of Eve’s necklace — these may add to the liveliness of the book, but they extinguish its chance of haunting the memory as Old Wives’ Tale and Clayhanger still have the power to haunt it.
But if the beginning of the novel is better than the end, Mr. Prohack himself, endearing creation that he is, fastens more and more upon the affections. One follows him with keen sympathy from the amazing day when he receives the news of the legacy unexpectedly and rather arbitrarily bequeathed to him, through all his complicated worries and his excursions into grandeur as a rich man, to the moment of godlike gloriousness when he is in a position to rescue that sophisticated superman, his son, from ruin and disgrace, and to say to him, ‘My poor boy, do try not to be an ass.’ And when he takes his one peep over the tall fence of matrimonial circumspection, that peep is so tentative and so innocent, and his flight from the call of vagrant romantic adventure is so precipitate, that it would be grim moralist indeed who would grudge him the comfortable purring of bis vanity as he dwells in memory upon the episode of Lady Massulam. In short, this simple-hearted yet canny being, who sees himself as a sardonic philosopher, is a thoroughly lovable and highly diverting companion of a mile.
ETHEL WALLACE HAWKINS.