Extravaganza

ODTAA--John Masefield--Macmillan ($2.50). The tumultuous imagination of John Masefield, rather than fling itself upon an actual people, time and country, with the consequent danger of doing violence to truth, has invented not merely a fantastic tale but complete ethnological, political and geographical data to go with it. Highworth Ridden, youngest son of a hardbitten English squire, is followed through a color-splashed whirligig of adventure in the Republic of Santa Barbara (roughly, South America), where he chances to feel warmly toward the daughter of a great house politically hated by the slightly insane local tyrant, Dictator Lopez. There is bloodletting for the sake of seeing an ivory floor incarnadined. The palace is yellow; the guards wear scarlet; Santa Barbarian males are tall, red-golden of hue and often go nearly naked. There are some 400 pages of highly involved events, followed by much sacking and a fierce conflagration, and the hero sails away having accomplished nothing more than the reader's unmitigated excitement. Author Masefield, famed and beloved as the poet of Dauber, Reynard the Fox, etc., does not, one hopes, take his novel writing as anything but an exuberant indulgence with, one also hopes, some lucrative return. There is nothing in this or in his first prose extravaganza, Sard Harker, to show that the Sage of Boar's Hill knows anything about novels except to start a tale and then spin away for all he is worth, and the devil take the hindermost reader. His new title stands for One Damn Thing After Another.

Hesitant Nymph

SIMONETTA PERKINS--L. P. Hartley--Putnam ($2). Demonstrating what might conceivably befall a high-caste Boston nymph when exposed to the languorous breath of Venice. Lavinia Johnstone, preserved by her friends as the symbol of their bloodless conventionality, undergoes strange fevers in the presence of a champion gondolier, calls herself Simonetta Perkins to absorb the shock, bids him--late one night--take her up an obscure canal, hesitates, is lost, countermands the order. Author Hartley admires Author Max Beerbohm.

Cat

THE DANCER'S CAT--C. A. Nicholson--Bobbs-Merrill ($2). An ostentatiously esoteric tale, the core of which may or may not be the weird relationship between a young Russian dancer, Lydie Manuiloff, and her Siamese cat, Pasha. Besides this problem in comparative psychiatry, there is a remarkably fine exposition of British and Russian reticences in conflict. Lydie and her English friends are all truth-tellers, but all carry the suppressions of their cultures. Lydie understands, is tolerant of their kind of truth. Her kind hurts them. In addition she is suspected of poisoning her fiance with fish that was actually prepared by the cook to kill Pasha. This inscrutable animal lives on, after the youth is dead, a silent, stately monopolist of morbidly curious attention, in the minds of the English protagonists.

ALERT READERS

--are not permitting the season to slip by without having read, or planned to read, books designated by the best current criticism as:

Rich Writing

Afternoon--Susan Ertz ($2). A cool study in mature emotions--the remarriage problem.

Lolly Willowes--Sylvia Townsend Warner ($2). Lady into witch.

It's Not Done--William C. Bullitt ($2). The dilemma of life and living in Philadelphia--sexy but sure, swift.

The Great Valley--Mary Johnston ($2). Scotch settlers in a magnificent panorama of the Shenandoah Valley.

The Romany Stain--Christopher Morley ($2.50). Reviewed in this issue.

The facilities of TIME'S book departmentare at its readers' disposal. To order the above, or any other books, inclose a check or cash with a note to the Book Editor making plain to whom you wish your purchases sent.