NEW AMERICAN NOVEL

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21580, 26 August 1933, Page 9 (Supplement)

NEW AMERICAN NOVEL

" GUSTS OF PESSIMISM " According to an announcement on the jacket of " To Make My Bread," a responsible American critic considers the author, Grace Lumpkin, to be one of the most important American novelists of the day. Notwithstanding the fact that the story won for its author the Maxim Gorky prize, and that it contains passages of extreme power and vigour, there will doubtless be many who will regard the critic's verdict as one of those irresponsibilities into which even responsible critics at times are drawn.

Miss Lumpkin's somewhat lengthy tale is set in one of the southern States of those that are united. She brings the reader face to face with a family wresting a meagre livelihood from barren ground in the mountains. She unfolds a story of primitive loves and hates, of the awful yearly struggle against winter starvation, of " moonshiners" and revivalists, and of the superb adventures of childhood. In spite of frequent grim studies of primitive poverty, these early chapters, are exceedingly well done, and one feels {genuine sympathy for Emina McClure, ler brood of mountain children, and their lovable old " granpap." Then Miss Lumpkin uproots her mountain families and transports them to one of the mill villages of the south. From then on she gives way to violent gusts of pessimism as sho portrays the reactions of these primitive folk to industrial conditions. Miss Lumpkin is evidently sure of her ground in penning a scathing indictment of these mill towns of tho south, but for all that the latter half of her book does not ring true. There is more than a tinge of the propaganda of technocracy in her gloomy pictures of factory life and all aro shadowed with depressing pessimism.

It is a common fault with American novelists to be too much captured by ideas. Like Sinclair fjewis, their acknowledged master, they write novels with a purpose, and the purpose generally defeats its own end, for very few of "them have Lewis' gift of sketching character. One cannot help thinking that "To Make My Bread" would have been a really notable novel had Miss Lumpkin not thought so persistently in abstract terms.

"To Make My Bread." by Gruce Lumpkin. (Gollancz.)