NOTES ON FICTION

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21139, 14 April 1934, Page 15

NOTES ON FICTION

TERRIBLY SHARP After Such Pleasures. By Dorothy Parker. Longmans, Green & Co. 205 pp. "How pleasant to know Mr Lear!" On the other hand, how uncomfortable to know Miss Dorothy Parker —or rather, to be known by her! She is so terribly sharp; and, what makes it worse, she is so deadly, so artistic a reporter. Nearly everybody realises, perhaps, sooner or later, that somebody or other has seen clean through him—or her. It is unpleasant. But it is also, perhaps, the foundation of social security, or.at least of social comfort and easy make-believe that these perscrutators are either incapable of letting out what they have seen, or don't want to. Not so Miss Parker, who sees clean through everybody and his neighbour, his wife, his servant, his dupe, and his dear, and everything that is his, and who reports upon it with an exactitude quite horrifying. Yet she is not ample. Her scope is always small. She does wonders with the monologue or thought-transcript, with the one-end only telephone conversation, with the inner-outer revelation, as when she gives us one side only of a duologue and with it a notation of the speaker's unspoken thoughts. She has not yet written a novel and perhaps may never write one. But she has already caught and spread out for view, with cruel, delicate precision, more of life than many novelists with a long list of successes. In these eleven stories, for example, she exposes the truth about a quite ordinary, too ordinary, well-meaning man and wife who bored and exasperated each other into the divorce court; about a romantic, stagestruck young wife whose illusions are dispelled by a single afternoontea with a great actress, but who is driven to assert them again by a few unsympathetic, sarcastic words from her husband: about a dreadfully tiresome, unattractive, efficient nurse, dreadfully pathetic in her hunger for kindness and affection, and placed for a time in a household where every circumstance emphasises the hopelessness of her hunger and the pitifulness of the scraps on which it feeds. But the best of all is "Dusk before Fireworks," in which ice and iron impart their qualities to every sentence. A girl in love with a young man too numerously loved arid sought, agile in grace and cunning, perfected by nature and practice in the technique of holding and denying: jealousy, tenacity, pride, and rebellion have rarely been so well depicted. But the best of Miss Parker's art is in the few I strokes with which she certifies the : intellectual and spiritual superiority of this girl, and so gives the last , turn to her psychological screw. It i will be gathered that Miss Parker ; concentrated upon exposure. She ; looks satirically at life. There are : no signs of magnanimity or optii mism. But she is hard to confute, I to convict of prejudice or distortion. ! She is as scrupulous as she is sharp. | The only answer to her is, "That's i not everything." | THE TRUTH—A RIDDLE ' The Truth About My Father. By Paul I Martens. Collins. 252 pp. Mr Martens is an ingenious and persuasive writer, as he showed in "Death Rocks the Cradle." Here he tells, as by the pen of a son, determined to withhold nothing, the life-story of Saville Rivington, a brilliant barrister who became Lord Chief Justice. The story is made realistic by many clever fetches j from the manner and method of I biography, especially by the notes on cases in which Rivington appeared, cither as prosecuting or as defending counsel, or which lie tried; and | it is sometimes impossible not to fancy the case could be turned up again in the newspaper . . . When Rivington died, he left his son a ! record, explanation of certain events, appalling to accept, impossible to reject, except on the pathologist's too easy, too welcome explanation. Mr Martens, as a novelist, has a hand full of trumps, and lias only to learn to bid high and to play them to their full value. i ! A FUNNY ONE Five Days. By Erie Hatch. G. P. I Putnam's Sons. 236 pp. i The old trick—the man who lias I lost his money and lost the girl who j loved it breaks away into freedom | and the fantastic. But Mr Hatch ■ plays it as if it had never been played before, and switches his really likeable young Beadleston Preece into delicious company and delicious adventures. Gone his millions, gone the fan- Madelaine; but in their stead Swazey the burglar, Mary the lovely, vagabond nobody, good Bishop (a real bishop) Hartley, Harris Payton, the escaping slave of a rich wife, and Carlotta, too free and imperious to be escaping from anything, but taking her way. This, fortunately—through Beadleston's burgling the wrong house, on Harris's behalf and under Swazey's guidance—was that of the motor yacht which Beadleston had stolen from his swindling broker; and the rest is too good to be told. MiHatch has avoided I-told-you-so romantic hitch ings and managed the less obvious ones beautifully. He has provided enormous fun; but, above all, he has introduced and endeared Swazey, the nicest burglar yet. Swazey is a man of such delicacy, indeed, that he becomes shy before a locked door, requiring to be opened.

"Come on,'' said I'a.ylon, •'tell papa." He drew back his arm and made his hand into a list. "Why doesn't itsybitsy Swazeyeums want to unlock door-door for Beadle?" "Oh, pshaw," said Swazey. "I don't want yousc to see how I do it, dat's all!"

This is the funny book—and more than funny book—for which everybody has been waiting, consciously or not.

SIGNAL A MISS

As Good as a Mile. By Edward Albert, Ivor Nicholson & Watson. 320 pp.

i The publishers declare that Mr Albert's first novel set him "in the very first rank of contemporary Scotch novelists," and, indeed, "gave him a high place in modern literature." Possibly; but if so, "As Good as a Mile" either sets him back sharply or implies the publishers' low estimate of contemporary Scottish novelists, and, indeed, of modern literature. For "As Good as a Mile" is a thriller distinguished from the commonplace only by tiresome undergraduate jocosity—some of the characters are drawn from Edinburgh quadrangles—and by villainy too silly to be plausible. However, there are laughs and thrills easy to come by; and some descriptions of Highland scenery give Mr Albert more reasonable ground for pride than his publishers' laudationa