International Rollo

BETWEEN Two WORLDS--Upton Sinclair--Viking ($3).

Between Two Worlds is a continuation of World's End (TIME, June 24), Upton Sinclair's attempt at a fictional history of the 20th Century. That assignment would be tough enough to paralyze the soul of the greatest artist, the profoundest analyst, whom the 20th Century could produce. To Upton Sinclair, who is neither, it is so much duck soup. There are and will be far more important treatments of the theme; but it is unlikely that any will be more easily written--or read.

The clothesline for Sinclair's review is a strategically placed young man named Lanny Budd. Lanny is the bastard son of a U. S. munitioneer and of a Parisian artists' model. As his father's son he meets all the interesting people who Socialist Sinclair thinks are indispensable to history. From them Lanny picks up all the dirt.

World's End closed with Lanny's departure from the Versailles Conference. Between Two Worlds opens at Bienvenu, a villa on the French Riviera, from which base Lanny can examine Europe of the '20s. He lives there with Beauty, his full-blown, flighty mother, and their friend Kurt, an ex-agent of the Kaiser who composes music and smolders over the bitter treatment of the Fatherland. Now & then Lanny's friend Rick turns up. He had wanted to be a dramatist, but as the decade progresses he becomes a leftish journalist. Not infrequently Father Budd dashes over from Connecticut to give the U. S. businessman's point of view; he talks to Lanny about sex and a career, and to Basil Zaharoff about armaments, oil, and what wires to pull. They go to a great-many conferences--San Remo, Spa, Cannes, Genoa--where Sinclair introduces vignettes of Steffens, Mussolini, Litvinoff, and a sweet-tempered scorching of Harding's Roman Ambassador, Richard Washburn Child.

Every Christmas Lanny goes to Kurt's home and brushes up on conditions in Silesia. He also visits Munich, where he hears an early oration by "Adi" Schicklgruber; Paris, where Isadora Duncan propositions him; Rome, where he gets into hot water trying to help Matteoti; London, where he promotes Stepfather Marcel's paintings. He becomes something of an art expert, has his first durable affair, goes on dialectical sprees with his Red Uncle Jesse, acquires a becoming pinkness. He captures a U. S. multimillionheiress, experiences life among the shrieking rich on Long Island's South Shore, turns up (along with Winston Churchill) in the gallery of the Stock Exchange on the morning of Oct. 24, 1929.

It is a little like a Rollo book on an international scale, or Tom Swift and His Electric Historoscope. The history is cursory but abundant and palatable; the excursions into art and love combine "progressive" views with a captivating boyishness. The book is perhaps above all impressive as a demonstration that an almost moronic cheerfulness is not necessarily the foe of intelligence and sincerity, of which Sinclair has plenty. The '20s were a crazy, tragicomic incubator of a catastrophic future. Sinclair makes that, and the grim lines which sharpen their terrible convergence a few years later, perfectly clear. He also makes his whole 859-page canvas as shamelessly ingratiating as a barroom nude.

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