The Prodigal Women

THIS brilliant novel is a picture of one kind of hell, what one might call the Gulf of the Self-tormentors. Location and story are realistic enough and the telling is almost scientifically calm, without malice or extenuation; but the characters — all but one or two — are damned. As the title suggests, they are all guilty of waste. They waste feelings, energy, time, life. Ostensibly they are victims of a bad period and environment, for they are would-be sophisticates of the decade of gin, license, and prohibition; but actually they are a selected group of weaklings, fools, queer folk, degenerates, or the defeated. To say this is, however, not to say that they are not interesting, their plight pathetic, their histories instructive. The trouble is that, of the three women most fully portrayed, Maisie is clearly a moron, Betsy very much like a lovable dog and not much more intelligent: and of the men, at least three impress one as nearly or quite psychopathic. This accumulation of exceptional people results in an appearance of the sensational, which is regrettable because it is not really accurate.

For the key to the book is Leda March, and one cannot entirely judge Leda until the last chapter. She perhaps states the theme when she quotes Schiller’s line, “Keep true to the dreams of thy youth,” and states it again in the long reverie at the end, when she realizes that no one can bring order into the chaos of her life but herself, and that to do so demands renunciation and loneliness. We see then that the somewhat lurid main story really is a kind of Hades through which she has passed, a traitress to her genuine vocation of poet —a vocation requiring self-discipline and solitude.

For the rest, how Miss Hale can write! From the first page, one is caught by the push and tide of her style. There appears to be nothing she cannot do. Her sense of dialogue is unerring; her psychological insight is at times profound; her feeling for beauty is constant in spite of the sordidness of much of the life she portrays.

R. M. G.