Halting

ONE INCREASING PURPOSE--A. S. Hutchinson--Little, Brown ($2.00). Some people take the author of // Winter Comes for a well-meaning fellow, whose inarticulateness is brought on by a great and overpowering sincerity. Others profess to find in his lapses of grammar, Ids incessant repetition of hanging phrases and mazes of parenthetical elucidation, the traits of a deliberate genius for writing of the perplexing muddle known as Life to Average People. Still others, a critical few, whose censure affects the sales of Author Hutchinson's books about as much as it would discourage gum-chewing among U. S. salesladies, maintain that this author is a harmless dolt with a flair for illiterate sob-mongering.

Author Hutchinson's own view of himself is brightened by the radiant fact that his books do sell, en masse. In this latest, he consumes 448 pages with a halting account of how, after the War, Simon Paris by an unspectacular miracle found "Christ the Common Denominator," and became an active (soapbox preaching) part of the Great Purpose. Nothing is made very clear, except that Simon's two brothers ("Old Niggs" and "Old Charles") were unhappy and he was kind to them. The wife of one was ravishing but gambled and fell ill with smallpox. The wife of the other wanted to run off with a doctor but stopped when Simon notified her that "Old Charles" had cleared her way by blowing his own head in.