Recent & Readable

THE HAPPY LAND--Eric Knight--Harper ($2.50).

Three years ago Yorkshire-born Eric Knight won a critical success with Song on Your Bugles, a first novel vividly evoking Yorkshire textile workers of 25 years ago. (Author Knight, ex-reporter and Hollywood writer, emigrated to the U. S. as adolescent.) Deft but less vivid, The Happy Land tells the story of a coal-mining Yorkshire village on the dole. In particular it is the story of the motherless Clough family, the spunky fight of eldest daughter Thora against depression odds which send one brother to prison, frustrate the talents of another, turn her father into a fiercely baffled radical, make tormenting alterations in her love life.

DECADE, 1929-1939-- Stephen Longstreet--Random House ($2.50).

To try telling the story of the U. S. '30s through one family, its friends and servants, and to make a rapid rather than stuffy job of it, is no bad idea. That the people should be caricatures, symbols, is fair enough. That they should also be stock-company characters--a tough old millionaire, a fat Hungarian cook, a brilliant great-grandson who dies for Loyalist Spain--is neither necessary nor advantageous. Noisy, self-confident, First-Novelist Longstreet flashes a sharp cartoonist's talent in the telling of his rather tawdry events. In spots Decade has real vitality. More often it is just "lusty."

STONES FOR BREAD -- Edwin Carlile Litsey -- Caxton ($2.50).

Stones for Bread is the dead simple, dead earnest story of two brothers, all but subhuman garbage heap derelicts, who live near a Kentucky town. Such little plot as there is develops in the death of one brother, of a dog, of a mule; in the chance hour's visit of a sleek woman who tears brother Martin's childish heart to bits. In the main, though, the book is merely a play-by-play description of the dim mental processes of the brothers--perhaps the most authentic imbeciles in U. S. letters--and of their borderline methods of staying alive. Author Litsey slops over a few times. But few books have matched his for its communication of utter loneliness, its sensuous clarity, its grave and unforced pity, the unpremeditated purity of its telling.

WINDLESS CABINS--Mark Van Doren --Henry Holt ($2.50).

A subtle and sober poet, Mr. Van Doren has published one novel before. With considerable art Author Van Doren builds up an atmosphere of foreboding through a girl's terror of her horrible-tongued, death-ridden aunt, manages an accidental murder by the girl's sweetheart, a boy who works in a tourist camp, creates one or two unforgettable moments of suspense as the boy successfully hides his crime. But then he goes soft on the whole thing in a happy ending for which Aunt Esther conveniently turns out to have a heart of gold.

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