Janet March

She Was Bored

The Story. The Marches' position in the Middle-Western metropolis of St. Pierre was assured -- weren't they the children and grandchildren of old Andrew March who had always saved his pennies and whose name was still a byword for the good old rock-bound kind of success? And Bradford and Penelope March were advance for their day -- they let their children call them by their first names and believed in their being healthy and, as far as possible, free. But Janet, their daughter, was an absolutely modern model with the latest streamline attachments, self-starter and all.

Eupeptic, good-looking, skilled in sports, fearless, a trifle bored, she grew up during the War under all the best social auspices, which bored her still more. She tried college casual flirtations, filing, the empty kisses of empty young men, the social round -- and criticized them all. She was loved by a somewhat pallid would-be author -- and cured herself. She gave herself to Vincent Blatch. The experience was helpful, though it nearly resulted in misfortune. He didn't love her, really -- all she learned was that this was a crazy world. She wouldn't marry an acceptable parti. She moved to Greenwich Village and found it as meaningless and conventional as St. Pierre. Then she ran into Roger Leland, who kept a bookshop, and had known her when he was an adolescent and she was a child.

Roger had had his own troubles. In boyhood, Plainsburg -- a hot, dead, little country town. Later, Herald College where he had had a prize scholarship, and which he found as vapid as Janet, on the whole, found her college. Adventures with girls, an attempt at treading the primrose path (abandoned when he discovered those well advertised flowers a little too stale for enjoyment), a search for the beauty and truth of life in odd exploits that led, apparently, nowhere; Sally the beautiful, and their engagement, broken, mended, broken; Sally, the unlucky, crushed pitilessly by circumstance she was not steely enough to defy; meeting Janet, at that time a child, and, from the contact of her fearlessness, making himself some sort of talisman against the crazy world. And then, years later, meeting Janet again.

Well, that was the end, of course. Roger had always been in love with her, really, as she remarked. So they set up housekeeping in Roger's bookshop, without benefit of clergy. They had their ups and downs at first, but they felt more and more married as they went on. And, oddly enough for a modern couple, they liked it.

The last page finds them almost ready to legalize their relationship. For one thing, Janet was going to have a baby -- and for once she didn't feel bored.

The Significance. A picture of our own times and the times immediately precedent drawn with astonishing fidelity, vigor and vitality. As faithful and interesting a delineation of at least three segments of present-day American society as could well be desired. Moreover, a book that has the unmistakable breath of life in it -- a book whose reputation may of necessity be transitory because it deals so entirely with current problems -- but a book that nevertheless is in aim and accomplishment excellent, sustained, true.

The Critics. The New York Herald: " He [Mr. Dell] means well, and, doubtless, he thinks he is telling the whole truth, instead of a part of it, and that part out of focus. . . . A book of altogether admirable workmanship, of much keen insight, but also one that is dangerously askew."

The Author. Floyd Dell was born in Barry, Ill., in 1887. He has worked in factories, on farms, at odd jobs -- written poems, a number of one-act plays, essays on feminism, a book on education -- been literary editor of the Chicago Evening Post, editor of The Masses and The Liberator, special writer for various New York newspapers. He is married and lives at Croton-on-Hudson, N. Y. Mr. Dell's previous novels are Moon-Calf (1920) and The Briary-Brush (1921).

Good Books

The following estimates of books' much in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion:

THE SACRIFICIAL GOAT -- Ernita Lascelles -- Boni ($2.00). Joan Candler, waitress in her mother's boarding house, had an exhausting time becoming Joan Chard, that promising new star of the sophisticated theatre. Her marriage with David complicated matters--they loved each other with youthful violence, but, no matter what David did, he never seemed to be able to make any money. Eruptive misunderstandings followed the injection of the Shavian Moreby into their lives--his verbal pyrotechnics made Joan dizzy and David heroically annoyed and led to a triangular drama in which poor David was unwittingly cast for the part of the sacrificial goat. But David escaped from the altar--Joan could not do without him after all.

NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET-- Peter B. Kyne -- Cosmopolitan ($2.00). Dan Pritchard was a young California business man and two women were in love with him. One was Tamea, South Sea Island Princess; the other, Maisie Morrison, good and clean and well-bred. Poor Tamea! Even though she was Pritchard's ward, she could not quite click in society--and knew it. So, after bearing a child to Pritchard that he never knew about, she died gracefully of consumption, a la Camille--and left Pritchard to eat his cake and have it too by marrying Maisie, one surmises.

THE HOPE OF HAPPINESS--Meredith Nicholson--Scribner ($2.00). Bruce Storrs, young architect, World War veteran, was faced with an extraordinary problem. His widowed mother, dying, confided to him that John Storrs had not been his father, and begged him, when he was left alone, to seek out and watch over his real father, Franklin Mills, the dominating " leading citizen" of a nearby city. He obeyed--and in what strange ways he came into contact with his father and his father's family--how he did his best to steady his jazz-bitten but charming half-sister Leila--how he fell in love with Millicent Harden whom Franklin Mills himself was thinking of marrying--and how at the last, when the house of Mills' self-absorbed pride had fallen to pieces about him, Bruce was able to share with his father the hope of happiness--forms the theme of this solid and interesting novel which reflects American life of the day without preachiness or distortion.

-- JANET MARCH--Floyd Dell--Knopf ($2.50).