by Sarah Gertrude Millin. New York: Boni and Liveright. 1925. 12mo. vi+ 216 pp. $2.00.
IN God’s Stepchildren Mrs. Millin gave us one of the most distinguished novels of the past season, baffling in its fusion of simplicity and power. Now comes Mary Glenn, different in theme and situation, yet equally distinctive in penetration and stark effectiveness. On the surface the new volume is more conventional than its predecessor. Its materials are uncompromisingly threadbare. To try to achieve originality in dealing with the old, old theme of snobbery by introducing a melodramatic accident as the precipitating agent would appear to be about as hopeless a task as a novelist could attempt. And yet, by some miracle of art, success attends the effort.
From her earliest years Mary Adams had been at odds with life. Born of humble English parents in an obscure South African village named Lebanon, she felt even there the taut, invisible lines of caste. There were those who were the right people, and there were those who were not. On one side of the line she stood with hot, shining eyes and a hard little laugh, burning with the consciousness that to the magistrate’s daughter and the bank-manager’s children she was of a different and inferior world. And so, to escape, she repulsed her Dutch lover and married Elliott Glenn, who was English and not colonial, who had what she could vaguely refer to as ‘family,’ who could take her away from her shabby surroundings. For a time she was able to patronize her former intimates in bright letters from an impossibly fascinating London. But her flight was of brief duration. In a few years she was compelled to return to Lebanon with her amiable, ineffectual husband and her little son, there through hard necessity to be stripped of sham after sordid sham until the futility of her pretensions became patent to all.
So far her experiences are ordinary enough; they take half the book in the telling, but they are merely the background for the real story. What led Mary Glenn to send an impassioned summons for help to her former lover, what took him and his wife over thirty miles of rolling South African country to her side, what flame of affliction shriveled and consumed her petty desires and discontents until she was ready to come to terms with life— that is what the book exists to reveal. And the revelation is accomplished with the clarity and intensity of a nightmare.
It is a strange and elusive art that is here exemplified. Its misleading simplicity results from the avoidance of all excess. It is in the highest degree a selective art. A smile, a twitching lip, a stammered remark, tell more than tiresome pages of trivialities. It is an art rooted in the rich, tangible soil of human experience. It never loses itself in psychological or social abstractions. Yet it is an art of remarkable universality. Through these highly individualized persons in their definitely localized surroundings shines universal human nature. At a time when popular fiction seems to oscillate between shrill neurotics and grunting rustics it is with a great sense of relief that one comes upon this story of normal men and women with passions as real and as elemental as wind and rain and sunlight.
GEORGE B. DUTTON