The Real Dope

GOD'S MEN (375 pp.]--Pearl Buck--John Day ($3.50).

Millionaire Clem Miller had a sick stomach and couldn't eat much himself, but he believed that people everywhere should have all the food they wanted without having to "ask for it or even work for it." His millionaire brother-in-law, William Lane, the newspaper-chain owner, couldn't help thinking Clem a crackpot. Lane thought people ought to work for their groceries. Novelist Pearl Buck leaves no doubt where she stands on this issue: her hero is Clem, who dies trying to sell the idea (to Roosevelt and Truman, among others) that so long as people's bellies are full, "almost any government would do." Publisher Lane, an Episcopalian unaccountably "reared in Calvinism and predestination," gets his comeuppance when his elemental "loneliness" drives him to embrace Roman Catholicism.

God's Men is an exercise in puppetry rather than novel writing. Both William and Clem are raised in Peking, the sons of U.S. missionaries, but Clem is sprung straight from Horatio Alger, while wellborn William is a selfish cad twisted by a Buck-chosen set of inferiority complexes. In the U.S., ruthless William goes to Harvard, achieves power through snobbery, a calculated money marriage and fabulous success in the newspaper business. Clem starts at a poor farm, but in some vague way bumbles to millions by dealing in surplus food. He even gets Henrietta, William's plain sister, through a correspondence courtship.

Last year Novelist Buck suggested that the U.S. drop the Voice of America and put up a chain of dime stores all over Asia, instead. As fiction, God's Men has about the same oversimplified simplicity. The Retail Bookseller, which exists to give the real dope to the trade, has a laconic line for this one: "Not Grade-A Buck."

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