Untitled Book Review

PEOPLE are always curious as to the new direction which fiction may take. The prediction has been made that the reëvaluation of our industry which has been forced upon us will inevitably bring into being novels dealing with the proletariat. Editors report that this tendency is already marked in new manuscripts, and, whether by chance or determination, there are a number of such titles on the fall announcements — at least two of them exceptionally promising.

Inheritance, by Phyllis Bentley (Macmillan, $2.50), comes to us from England with strong winds in its favor. A Yorkshire story of 600 pages, it spans six generations of a mill-owning family, beginning in 1812 and following down the disputed course of British labor until only yesterday. Because in its breadth it encompasses so many people, the overworked comparison with The forsyte Saga has been made. Unjustly, it seems to me, for Miss Bentley is surely possessed more by an all-absorbing idea than by that lingering, tender, knowledgeable development which Galsworthy gives his people. Miss Bentley hasn’t time to linger; she has to get on with her idea, and so her characters, however attractive at their entrance, have a way of fading weakly out of the picture. Both Galsworthy and Miss Bentley share a keen concern for social injustice, and this, together with the events which crowd its pages, does give Inheritance an interesting vitality, marking it as an uncommonly good picture, not of intimate people, but of the owner-laborer relationship.

Much more contemporary to an American audience is Nobody Starves, by Catharine Brody (Longmans, Green, $2.50), a novel by a new writer sure to be respected. There have, as you know, been a number of economic treatises explaining the way in or the way out of Depression, but to reduce our industrial crisis to its most human terms has been reserved for our novelists, specifically, it seems, for one novelist, Miss Brody. A trained observer (formerly on the staff of the New York World), she followed job hunters up and down the country. She worked in the Trenton potteries, and in the automobile factories of Detroit and points West. ‘The most tragic situation about work.’ she says, ‘is being out of work. Her story about the inside of factories and about the meagre precarious life of the factory automaton is utterly without special pleading or Marxian dialectic. It is a narrative singularly American: grim and pathetic, it records life with that understanding and unsentimental scrutiny which Mr. Lewis turned on Alain Street.