Rough-Hewn
by . New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1922. 12mo. vi + 504 pp. $2.00.
IN her new novel Mrs. Fisher has followed a plan which, though not unique, is unusual. We are asked to ‘ look on this picture, and on this ’ — two histories, developed in alternate episodes, entirely independent of one another, and united only in the conclusion. They present an American boy reared in an open, honest, and generally wholesome society; and an American girl reared amid artificiality, deception, and neglect. The girl, living in Southern France, is cared for and educated wholly by servants and private teachers; the boy, living in New Jersey, after a childhood in an average home with loving and self-sacrificing parents, proceeds to school and college. Each is an only child. The girl’s passion is music; the boy’s football. The girl, I take it, is presented as the victim of a selfish and silly pursuit of ‘culture,’ while the boy is offered as the estimable product of average American conditions left free to act. Which is ‘rough-hewn,’ or whether both are, I am not quite certain.
It is an interesting contrast, and on the whole skillfully carried out. I felt at times during the reading, however, that the author had viewed her two pictures, respectively, with ‘an auspicious and a dropping eye’; for she handles her French scenes with a somewhat hard realism, and her American with a somewhat romantic or idealistic tenderness. But in this impression I may be mistaken, for a reader not so familiar with her American setting might feel otherwise. The character of the boy, Neale Crittenden, is portrayed with much truth to nature up to his entrance to college; but from that point on, especially in the life of the athletic field, it seemed to me to be pictured from ‘ the outside,’ by a spectator and a feminine spectator at that — one who has faithfully studied the technique of sport and the jargon of college men, but has known only what the men chose to divulge. The French scenes, on the other hand, strike one not only as real but as quite masterly at times, and two or three of the French characters — Jeanne, Mlle. Hasparren, M. Yaudoyer — are admirably sketched. Jeanne, the old servant, especially, is a memorable creation. Certain incidents in the childhood of the girl, Marise, too, such as the little picnic with Sœur Ste.-Lucie at Lourdes, show the author’s narrative ability at its best.
In general, however, the novel is better in description than in narration, and, though it is written with never-failing facility, it lacks artistic economy. It is never uninteresting, but it might have been more engrossing if it had been three hundred pages long, instead of five hundred.
R. M. GAY.