A Certain Rich Man

A MITJLIOXAIKE in the throes of developing a social conscience is such an edifying subject for the novelist that it is sad to be obliged to report that, in the ease of Landon Roebuck and Vincent Sheean, he is also a very dull one.

Roebuck is in his forties, amiable, not stupid, not intellectual, passably good-looking. He has returned from war service to find that he has lost the taste for the diversions proper to his social position. He hardly knows his children. His wife wants a divorce. Worst of all, the vast Roebuck estates, which he had conscientiously managed for years, managed themselves admirably during his absence. The poor fellow is bored, a state which Roebuck and his author construe as a spiritual groping toward better things.

Roebuck strikes up ail acquaintance with a settlement house worker, a Miss Martha Winstead, who describes conditions in Harlem between discreet cocktails and platonic handclasps. Roebuck is impressed. He begins a housing project.

The project involves Roebuck in some peculiarly inept chicanery on the part of a group of Harlem landlords, gets him better acquainted with his daughter, and enables him to meet what he considers unusual people, although any fiction reader with a fairly retentive memory will recognize all of them as old friends.

The second step in Roebuck’s reorientation is a love affair with a childhood friend. Arabella Vidgeon is an internationally notable nymphomaniac who finds in Roebuck the great love of her life.

After such incidental complications as divorce settlements, trips to Mexico, and a neurotic governess, Roebuck loses both ladies but discovers that he can be reasonably content with his housing project.

It is an unhappy fact that the only good thing about this novel is Mr. Sheean’s intention in writing it. His desire to paint an accurate picture of our society, and to find a decent formula for living in it, underlies every page. But his people are without character, his plot is predictable without being in the least realistic, and his prose, inoffensive at best, at worst inadvertently represents Roebuck’s wife as nourishing her wrist watch with checks. Mr. Sheean has worked hard to give every point of view a mouthpiece, and every devil his due. The result, except for a couple of love scenes that would give the broadestminded vice-president the horrors, resembles one of those radio morality plays where a flourish of trumpets introduces nameless voices, each of which spouts a different philosophy, none of them convincing.

PHOEBE LOU ADAMS