A LITERARY BABBITT

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23169, 15 October 1938, Page 4 (Supplement)

A LITERARY BABBITT

HOMER ZIGLER'S AMBITION In "The Great American Novel," Mr. Clyde Brion Davis treats liis poor, ineffectual little- journalist (who tells his own story) with tenderness as well as with sharp insight. As a boy Homer Xigler earns two dollars and sees his name in the local newspaper. This fires his ambition. He turns journalist, but always he intends to write some day The Great American Novel.

J'his intention is iit once so vague mul so comprehensive that everything which happens to him, everything he reads about, sees on the films, or hears from other people, seems to be part of the novel. He puts all, or most of it, down in his diary. He marries—the Wrong Girl, of course; lie dreams, misleadingly, about the Right Girl; lie wanders from town to town and job to job, not quite foolish, not quite efficient. In the end he is passing beyond middle age and still the novel is not written.

1 suppose "Tho Great American Novel," is not everyone's cup of tea. writes Mr. John Brophy, in tho Daily Telegraph. London, but 1 am not so eccentric that I cannot believe my enjoyment will not be shared by lots of others. And very much I did enjoy this painful, pathetically faithful record of a commonplace mind reaching always hopefully beyond its scope, enamoured of its own trite reflections, responding so enthusiastically to 0110 literary masterpiece after another. The list of now forgotten "best sellers" incidentally given in these pages is in itself salutary reading. Homer Zigler is in many ways a universal figure: everyone knows someone like him. "Tho Great American Novel." by Clyde Brion Duvis. (Barker.)