Donn Benchley

THE MAD LOVER--Richard Connell--Minion, Batch ($2). Be not dismayed if you hear that this book deals with the spendthrift son of an Irish-American pioneer in a city with slums and polo, like Toledo. Author Connell writes books on transatlantic steamers and French park benches. He knows no more about sons of Irish-American pioneers than he does about Mongolian law or any other dull literary subject. Author Connell is an Irish poet who was made cheerful by being born in Poughkeepsie, N. Y. With no sorrows of Deirdre for ballast, his fancy flies off on such tangents as The Prince Has the Mumps, which is said to have tickled the imperial risibilities of George V.

Connell characters, as perfect and unreal as fashion advertisements, achieve life by the sheer velocity of their improbable actions. The Prince reappears in this novel precisely that way, deus ex machina. He modestly accepts a hand-knitted sweater from Hero Gerald Shannon, thereby enabling the latter to become a Self-Made Man and town-builder back in Ireland, as broad Kevin Shannon, his father, had been in the U. S. How might that be? By the same token that Gerald Shannon chances to hang his shoes on the chandelier and trousers in the tub, and to take a circus troupe to a senator's party, and to sing Rocked in the Cradle with a freight-yard detective, and to be very unwell on a mule-ship. Author Connell simply wants his hero to do those things and the hero does them with the utmost whimsical dispatch. There are some grand Irish moonlight and love talk in the last chapter too. Author Connell is a literary first cousin of both Funnyman Robert Benchley and Romancer Donn Byrne.