Provincial Aridity

THE CLOSED GARDEN--Julian Green--Harpers ($2.50).

The Story. There was no story, and that was Adrienne's trouble. Suppressed by a middle-class father concerned only that the arid monotony of his existence, be undisturbed, guarded by her sickly sister, the village spinster who envied youth and health and beauty, Adrienne was starved for drama. She could but set the stage--parlor furniture to dust in the morning, geraniums to cut by the garden gate--and wait in vain for the hero. From an upper window she watched for him, a middle-aged neighbor. The sharp ledge cut into her arms, the heavy scent of summer flowers filled her with longing, but her neighbor kept to himself. Adrienne tossed sleeplessly at night, traced listlessly the immutable pattern of her dull existence, suffered torments from her suspicious parent.

But there came a time when her tormentor was, instead, a self-seeking woman of questionable reputation, who insinuated in saccharine tones that Adrienne had of course murdered her father. Haunted by this new horror, dazed with the misery of her unrequited love, Adrienne rushed from the house, muttering confused reminiscences of a mind gone mad.

The Significance. Andre Maurois in-itroduces Author Green as "the best novelist of his generation." Others have declared him Balzacian, and murmured of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, for his uncanny realism is not of the modern self-conscious variety. Master of detail--heavy odor of wistaria over the garden wall, crunch of wheels on the gravel, pebbles shaping the brook into a plaited pattern--no single word is superfluous, and each image blends into an unforgettable whole.

As a writer Julian Green shows unmistakable talent, as a psychologist he is convincing beyond question, but as a novelist he has yet to achieve something of universality. As in his first novel, Avarice House, not a single character has charm or kindness--nothing but selfishness, fear, jealousy. Adrienne is said to be beautiful, but her submissiveness, her exasperating inhibitions, make her so unattractive that it is difficult to be as sorry for her as one no doubt should.

The Author. Critics' jargon had it in France that none but a foreigner could have observed the cloistered intolerance of French village life with such dispassionate accuracy, and none but an American would have taken a young girl's first love so seriously. Perhaps they knew that though Author Julian Green has lived most of his 27 years in France, and has always written in French, he was born of American parents, and studied a few years at the University of Virginia.