Sweet Adeline

The Story* coils and burrows under the green acres of Jalna, where the Whiteoaks live, in Ontario. The characters at the beginning are all Whiteoaks; there is Adeline, an old, crude, arrogant woman who wants to be 100 years old; her sons, Ernest and Nicholas, one of them over 70; Renny, present owner of Jalna, Adeline's grandson by another father; Renny has four brothers, Eden, 23, Piers, Finch, Wakefield, 9, and one sister, Meg, about 40.

Eden, the limberest sheep in the flock, wrote poetry that, unlike the poetry of most fictional characters, remains wisely unquoted in the book though it is accepted by a Manhattan publisher, in whose office Eden meets Alayne Archer. When he takes her back to Jalna, sweet old Adeline pats her "with a hand not so much caressing as appraising. She raised her heavy red eyebrows to the lace edging of her cap and commented with an arch grin: 'A bonny body. Well covered but not too plump. Slender, but not skinny. Meg's too plump. Pheasant's skinny. You're just right for a bride. Eh, my dear, but if I was a young man I'd like to sleep with you.' "

Pheasant was the illegitimate daughter of Maurice Vaughan, whose proffer of matrimony Meg had refused when she learned about Pheasant. On the return of Eden & Alayne, Pheasant is married to Piers. Soon, in this crowded turmoil of brothers and sisters, men and wives," there are readjustments. Renny and Alayne fall in love with each other, likewise Pheasant and Eden.

Finch, passing through the dark woods one night, hears Pheasant and Eden together, goes to tell Piers. Then Pheasant runs away to her father's house, until Renny and Piers go to bring her back to Jalna. Eden, too, flees the cold forests and the scornful, narrow fields of his bitter home. Alayne plans to return to New York and her old work, where one hopes that Renny will be her companion. Meg, the peg that holds the last of the story together, stops shuddering at the sins of Maurice.

The Significance rests upon two important counts. When the Atlantic Monthly, once the sedate barouche in which members of Boston's old literary circle sent their gentle brain children out for placid airings, last year whipped up its horses with a $10,000 prize for "the most interesting novel of any kind, sort or description," submitted by any writer, "whether born in London or Indianapolis." Readers looked for some tranquil, mildly effeminate tale, perhaps modeled on those of Edith Wharton. They were surprised on scanning the first installment of Jalna to discover a robust and brawny fiction, crowded with characters energetically alive, scampering into unexpected breaches of decorum. More than that, this book is one of the few important literary works which has come out of Canada in many a year. The central figure of the story,. Alayne, a participant of a more effete civilization, shares the reader's interest and bewilderment at the gnarled fibrous character of old Adeline, who towers over the book like a huge shadowy tree, leaves stirring in the wind, roots stirring in the tight, tough soil.

The Author. Mazo de la Roche, whose face and name are reminiscent of French forbears, was born in Toronto, educated thoroughly and spasmodically. She went to art school in Toronto, but, in contrast to those writers who in moments of inertia decorate their manuscripts with little pictures, Author de la Roche scrawled small stories on her sketch papers. Even now she prefers to write with a drawing board on her knees. Jalna, chosen as the best of 1,100 novels, is by no means her first published work,* though it is the first to bring her wide recognition. Now, in her native city, tea, dinner, luncheon tables buzz with compliments from dullards, staggered at a miracle which they had mistaken for mediocrity.

* JALNA--Mazo de la Roche--Litlle, Brown ($2).

* Knopf published one, Macmillan two of her previous books.