IT is a reproach to reviewers, readers, and the trade that so fine a novel as Lost Horizon should be so obscured during its first year of publication. One wonders what other good new books may now be gathering dust on some back shelf, unread and uncalled for. Not until the Atlantic published Good-bye, Mr. Chips!; not until Alexander Woollcott’s magnetic appraisal went on the air; not until England awarded the Hawthornden Prize to Lost Horizon, did readers wake up and discover the rare and exhilarating talent of James Hilton, a young English writer whose first four novels passed unnoticed in this country. Now, at last, he has become a lion, and the pack is in full cry.
Unless I miss my guess. Good-bye, Mr. Chips! (Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown, $1.25) will have this year the effect which Dickens’s Christmas Carol must have had ninety years ago. Lost Horizon (Morrow, $2.50) is more of an adventure. The novel opens with a Prologue quite as arresting as Kipling’s great story, ’The Man Who Was.’ An uprising in Baskul, India, compels the evacuation of the Europeans. The British Consul and his assistant, an ambiguous American financier and a missionary (‘a small rather leathery woman ‘), are in the cabin of a plane which is suddenly commandeered by a renegade pilot. When they fail to return, the scandal is hushed up, the act attributed to a madman, and a crash in some desert place as the inevitable result. But what really happened to the party I leave to Mr. Hilton to tell with his superlative skill. Adding only this: the story moves with deceptive speed, but its exciting pace should not leave you unaware of the style, the characterization, and the inner meaning.
For some years past there has been a determined search for the folk principle in American life. The primitive art of the Negro, the American Indian, and the mountaineer has been exhibited and compared with the archaic or present arts in European countries. Writers and artists both have sought inspiration in these folk creations. In a sensible article in Scribner’s Magazine, Ruth Suckow, in 1930, called upon the intelligentsia to cease chasing folk art and instead to try to understand the real basis of American civilization — the folks. And in the intervening four years Miss Suckow practised what she preached. The result stands before us: The Folks (Farrar & Rinehart, $3.00), a copious and comprehensive novel of American family life. ’The folks’ in this story — that is, the parents and grandparents — are rooted in an Iowa village. But the four children of the new generation, the generation that came of age just before the War, turn away from the traditions and restrictions of their family life. And in their peregrinations the younger Fergusons lead the story now to California, now to New York, now to the farther confines of our country, and in so doing qualify the novel as the most recent and ambitious attempt to compress our national life within the covers of a single book.
I apprehend that some readers may shrink from the size of this novel, just as others may feel that they can anticipate almost without reading the careers of these Iowa folks. But I believe that Miss Suckow’s book justifies its length. So sensibly has she discerned the common denominator in American life, so cordial and demonstrative are the multitude of details with which she builds up the individual careers of the Fergusons, that I found myself reading with a sense of recognition and a growing satisfaction in this typical and luminous story of America to-day
