Gentle Dew

THE HOUSE IN PARIS -- Elizabeth Bowen--Knopf ($2).

Elizabeth Bowen's progress as a novelist has been no less remarkable than the lack of attention her progress has aroused. Though it was obvious from her first book that she was an exceptionally gifted writer she has had the unfortunate faculty of frightening plain readers away. Her first novel, The Hotel, was bitterly amusing; To the North (TIME, March 13, 1933) was chillingly clever. But readers who had not yet discovered her or had not been scared off by her icy intelligence found in The House in Paris nothing to alarm or repel them, felt it descend on their receptive brows not like a hail of sleet but a gentle dew. Far & away Author Bowen's best book, it is certainly one of the few Grade-A novels that will be published in 1936. Though critics have never yet put Elizabeth Bowen on a par with Virginia Woolf, they may yet rank her ahead.

A little boy is waiting, in a strange house in Paris, for a mother he has never seen. He knows nothing about the people in the house; they know all about him. In a flashback to the past, the story tells why. Karen is young, beautiful, intelligent, one of an English family so aristocratic that it can afford not to be snobbish. She is engaged to just the right man; he has gone to the Orient on business for several months. Karen has a French friend, Naomi, of the governess type; she too is just engaged. Karen knows and dislikes the fiance, Max, an intense French Jew, does not want to see him again, but Naomi insists. When Karen and Max meet once more, the fat is in the fire--they are in love at a glance.

Neither says or does anything about it, until one night Max calls her up from Paris, arranges to meet her at Boulogne. For a night they are lovers, after which everything comes out. Naomi knows, Karen's mother has to be told. Before the tangle can be unraveled, Max has killed himself. Karen goes abroad to have her baby, Naomi back to her house to be an old maid. The story comes back to the present again, and now the reader knows that the little boy is Karen's son, and it is Naomi's house where he is waiting for his mother. Karen has married the man to whom she was first engaged, and since the child she has had by him has died and she can never have another, she has told her husband about her firstborn.

At the last minute she wires Naomi that she cannot come, cannot face it. The little boy is heartbroken, recovers in time to meet his stepfather, who comes instead, in a well-meaning but highly nervous condition. At his first marvelous sight of Paris at night, the little boy forgets his dreamed-for mother and his tragic day.

The House in Paris is the March choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club.*

The Author, like many a first-rate English writer, is Irish. Born in Dublin (1899), she was taken to England when she was 7, but has always spent her summers in Ireland, and still keeps up Bowen's Court, her family's 18th Century country house. Because of her mother's early death and her father's remarriage, Elizabeth Bowen left home at 19, lived with relations or hand-to-mouth in European hotels and boardinghouses. When she was 23 she married one Alan Cameron, went to live outside Oxford, and settled down to write.

Very blonde, very nearsighted, not unhandsome in a gaunt Anglo-Irish manner, Elizabeth Bowen is shy about her own work, has a few good friends, many an admiring acquaintance. She likes things neat, arranges her life in orderly fashion. Once a year she goes to Italy, once a year to Bowen's Court. The House in Paris is her eighth book. As yet hardly known in the U. S., she is becoming a name to reckon with in England.

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