Bobbed Life

WOMEN LIVE Too LONG--Vina Delmar --Earcourt, Brace ($2).-- Rental libraries are rapidly popularizing the kind of novels that Mrs. Horatio Alger, had she existed, would probably have longed to write. If Horatio's city boys were exemplary, the city girls of Mrs. Vina Delmar Alger are examples. While his boys swarmed up the ladders of success, her girls skid softly down self-greased ways to hell. His boys could not tell sex from a horsecar, her girls know skyscrapers are phallic. Though writing in this general drift (Bad Girl, Loose Ladies, Kept Woman], Authoress Delmar manages to steer her novels into waters of some depth. She is serious, sincere, sympathetic. At her best she grants a novelist's final absolution to the world--she writes of her characters as they would write of themselves. In her latest novel Authoress Delmar writes of three women and takes pains to show, not only that they lived, but that they lived too long. The thesis would swamp the book if the characters did not keep bailing it out. Katherine Bazin hates life after her husband leaves her, nurses her tuberculosis in hopes of death. When her husband unexpectedly returns she longs to live, but she dies. Her daughter Lou is happy when she and her husband Chappy are poor. When her baby son dies she almost dies too. Chappy becomes a feature comedian, they live in luxury; but Lou drinks herself to death. Her daughter Iris goes on the stage, marries Pat Arden. Everything goes well until Pat is unfaithful with a girl Iris hates. Iris does not mind the unfaithfulness but she does mind the girl. Though Pat still loves Iris and she still loves him, their marriage and Iris' life are hurt beyond repair.

"Published Feb. 18.

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