Fresh Start

ZERO -- Collinson Owen -- Dodd, Mead ($2). John Garth, a London literary machine capable of producing $35,000 per annum, has fame, a mansion, a pretty wife and a son. But the wife plays cards too much. The son is at school. John Garth sickens of being a machine. Convalescing in obscurity, with a beard and scar, after the wreck of a French flyer, he decides not to correct the report that he was killed. He proceeds as Matthew Knowle, the pen-name under which he just published his most successful novel of all, to start a new life "from zero." The Matthew Knowle novel provides funds and Author Owen provides our hero with his conception of a perfect woman, a small divorcee with every quiet grace and no questions. When the posthumous production of the late John Garth's first play is a huge success; when Mrs. Garth, penitent, lies gravely ill; when Matthew Knowle sees the grown son that John Garth sired, the divorcee, Julia, acts "sportingly." Wrench though it is for her, she starts John Garth back to life by leaving Matthew Knowle. . . . Admirers of the British literary male will call Julia "a brick" and the book a triumph. Others may say that Author Owen, a polished writer withal, has merely sublimated a personal desire in the tepid crucible of melodrama.