Moon Tide

THIS is a novel you’d probably like to read before they make the movie. It is impossible to believe that in one of those vast West Coast offices the casting is not already well under way. And a very good movie it should be, too. On a barge off a San Francisco wharf the Swede sailor and the girl he saves from suicide grope through poverty and personal devils to a sort of cosmic understanding. There is a symbolic fisherman who is second cousin once removed, perhaps, from the Servant in the House. There is weather, and dialogue in the vernacular, flophouses and Japs, drunks and mission priests. . . . A book which is bound to attract an audience, and which has already had extravagantly laudatory reviews. To this particular reader it seems a tender, rather moving story, considerably short of epochal.