Ellen Spring

’Thirty-four years old, with a son I did not want and nothing else at all out of life except an assortment of miserable hates’ — so Ellen Spring sums herself up to herself in the rasping mood in which we first encounter her. She and the son, who is ten and engaging, have come from New York City to the part of Washington known as the Palouse. Their refuge is to be a cottage, scarcely more than a hovel, in the midst of rolling acres of wheat on a farm that Ellen has not seen since her Spokane girlhood and has lately inherited. What she has fled from is the chief of her assortment of hates, a husband whose general rottenness includes a specific talent for coldly deliberate mental cruelty. The question of divorce has been left in the air. Meanwhile she throws herself into making a habitation of the hovel; it is at least something to do. As it turns out, the task undertaken for distraction and in soul sickness is the beginning of a subtle, inexorable process whereby the Palouse reclaims her, heals her, opens for her new doors to self-respect, to friendship, to fulfillment, and puts her finally beyond the worst that malice can contrive. The story, a second novel, is deftly told with unusual economy of means, and in places with real power and beauty, by a writer who has the singular gift of making Henry James effects flower naturally out of Knut Hamsun materials. Whether to her other talents she joins the talent for growing, which includes outgrowing — that is the question that will matter the most to her future. She needs to outgrow, for instance, the amiable weakness that makes a young writer bestow eminent articulacy and wit on every one of the characters he likes and turn every one of those he detests into a nearly incredible monster of malevolent stupidity.

W. F.