Mary's Neckers

MARY'S NECK--Booth Tarkington--Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

Every summer, as the best resort from heat and the vapors, the Bullfinches, Allstovers, Timberlakes et al. go to Mary's Neck on the Maine Coast. There they loll on the beaches, collect antiques, sunburns and memories for their coming hibernations in more urban homes.

A woman newspaper correspondent's story of that "quaint old Down East fishing village, full of quaint old interesting characters and quaint old interesting furniture and fashionable summer people," sends the Masseys with their daughters, Enid and Clarissa, to Mary's Neck. Their first mistake is to arrive in April, with the snow still flying. The interval before the arrival of the summer colonists they fill in with hiring native help, buying and remodeling their cottage, antiquing, motorboating.

When "they" arrive the Masseys have some trouble breaking the social ice. But Enid and Clarissa soon attract the younger set. and the life of the colony follows them. Enid and Eddie Bullfinch, two of the most comic portraits from Connoisseur Tarkington's album, make life almost intolerable but all the more enjoyable throughout the summer. After several wrong guesses as to whether the Bullfinches, Allstovers or Timberlakes are the people to know, the Masseys find they are all about the same, all worth knowing, if you like to chuckle. The colony gets some chuckles out of the Masseys too when Mr. Massey is elected chairman of the Rocky Meadow Club, becomes a Mussolini overnight.

The season draws to a close with the arrival of Prima Donna Parka who takes a fancy to Mr. Massey, and since she must have scandal wherever she goes, kisses Mr. Bullfinch. The Masseys pay off their social debts with a lecture on the Ceramics, Basketwork and Tribal Life of the Ogilluwaya Indians. All in all, everybody has enjoyed the summer. Everybody has made so many humorous mistakes and mutual blunders that, like checks at the clearing house, they cancel each other out.

The Author. Newton Booth Tarkington (no A. B., but honorary A. M. Princeton, 1899; Litt.D. Princeton, 1918; Litt.D. De Pauw, 1923; Litt.D. Columbia, 1924) was born in Indianapolis, Ind. in 1869, owes much to Middle Western authors William Dean Howells. Mark Twain. As a boy he had St. Vitus-like nervous disorders; improved, went to college at Princeton. He returned to live in Indiana, started out as an illustrator. Failing at that he wrote for eight years: his gross returns were $22.50. The Gentleman from Indiana (1899) gave him his start. Penrod (1914) kept him going strong. Now one of the most popular American authors (The Magnificent

Amber sons, Alice Adams won the 1919, 1922 Pulitzer prizes), he winters in Indianapolis, summers at Kennebunkport, Me., in a home well-known as "the house that Penrod built." About 1917 he began to go blind; in August, 1930 he became completely so. Now at last, after eight eye operations. Author Tarkington is able to see again the faces of the American types he knows by heart.

Mary's Neck is the February choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

Increasing-Pains

TRAGIC AMERICA--Theodore Dreiser--Liveright ($2).

Aristotle's famous theory of dramatic katharsis, according to which men are supposed to purge themselves of dismal emotions by witnessing the enactment of tragedies still more dismal, seems to collapse before tragic authors in general, Theodore Dreiser in particular. An American Tragedy (1925) apparently did not dissipate, merely whetted his gloom. In Tragic America he looks for trouble wholesale, finds it just one more monopoly of the capitalistic system. "Actually an oligarchical group of lords in America is today seeking to enslave this great people. And, for that purpose, first seeking to debase it mentally." The implications are dreadful.

As preventive against further debasement of American people's mentality Dreiser offers some 400 pages of statistical indictments of capitalism and capitalists. The Morgans, Supreme Court, Red Cross, railroads all come in for a good wigging. Nothing offering opportunity for indignation is left out, from the claim that "ROCKEFELLER is RELATIVELY

THE PRESENT OWNER OF AMERICAN INDUSTRY" (Dreiser's capitals) to that fact that in Tacoma, Wash, "on February 19, 1931 . . . sixteen men were poisoned by food from the Volunteers of America soup kitchen, from which four died."

For this ill-assorted avalanche of complaints Author Dreiser's prescription is simple. "America, as I see it, should be reorganized on a noncompetitive basis commercially." This will of course necessitate "an executive power for the American working masses not unlike the Communist Central Committee in Moscow. . . ." By this device the masses will somehow be enabled to oligarchize over the masses.

Gold's Gloom

ESSAYS IN PERSUASION--John Maynard Keynes--Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).* When England in 1925 returned to the international gold standard only a few economists, generally conceded to be crazy, bewailed the fact. Most famous of these few was Cassandra Keynes, as he calls himself, as his opponents love to call him. Writing with such style and pith that even runners may read and understand, he has here collected "the croakings of twelve years." Most of his earnest persuasions, that persuaded few people at the time, have turned out to be dismal prophecies. Specimen (1921): "The unwillingness of American investors to buy European bonds is based on common sense."

Though somewhat shaken by "The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill," who brought England back to gold, Economist Keynes still believes that "the problem of want and poverty and the economic struggle between classes and nations, is ... a transitory and an unnecessary muddle. For the Western World already has the resources and the technique, if we could create the organization to use them, capable of reducing the Economic Problem, which now absorbs our moral and material energies, to a position of secondary importance." Meanwhile bankrupts and the white-collar unemployed can gather much information, some solace out of Keynes's canny croaks.

Model T Utopia

BRAVE NEW WORLD--Aldous Huxley--Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

In the Year of Our Ford 632 the world was a vastly different place. At the Central London Hatchery & Conditioning Centre fertilized human eggs were bokanovskified to produce thousands of identical twins. These embryos were cultured in bottles, immunized and conditioned, decanted after nine months as lusty infants to be further conditioned by hypnopaedia (sleep teaching) into useful, satisfied citizens of Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta or Epsilon class. The Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons did all the work; the Alphas had all the fun. They travelled in helicopters, went to the "feelies," danced to the music of sexophones. In the Year of Our Ford 632 every woman wore a Malthusian belt, blushed with joy if a young man told her she was pneumatic. There was no pain, no disease, no old age, little thought. The words, "mother," "baby," "home," were gross obscenities, made so by Our Ford (who sometimes called himself Our Freud). Motto of the World State was Community, Identity, Stability; the Golden Rule was: "Everyone Belongs to Everyone Else." Wisdom came straight from the horse's mouth . . . straight from the mouth of Ford himself: "Ford's in his flivver. All's well with the world." When you were out of sorts you got drunk on a soma tablet; if you were a woman, and the condition persisted, you took a Pregnancy' Substitute Treatment. Sometimes you went to Solidarity Service, made the Sign of the T, sang hymns:

"Ford, we are twelve; oh, make us one, Like drops within the Social River;

Oh, make us now together run As swiftly as thy shining Flivver"

Someone put alcohol in Bernard Marx's blood surrogate while he was still in his bottle, and Bernard turned out a misfit. He took his Lenina to the feelies and to color organ concerts, danced with her to "Bottle songs" ("Bottle of mine, it's you I've always wanted . . ."), but he objected to sharing her with others. For that he was banished to Iceland. "Mr. Savage" was b --n on an Indian reservation of a real m ----r, and he too fell in love

with Lenina, fled from her like St. Cimeon Stylites from Thais. His Fordship Mustapha Mond granted him an old lighthouse where he could live in savagery, but television reporters hunted him out, Lenina returned to torture him and the flesh got him in the end. Early morning reporters found him dangling in his lighthouse. "Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, northeast, east, southeast, south, south-southwest. . . ."

A page from Swift, a page from Samuel Butler, a page or two from Jules Verne, Herbert George Wells and Anatole France: put them all together and they spell HUXLEY. Author Huxley points out that his brave new world is strikingly similar to a world simultaneously envisioned by a slightly soberer scientist, Bertrand Russell. Delighted when critics discovered that he was a Thinker, he is still unwilling to give up tomfoolery. In Brave New World he mixes it so well with sober, cynical conclusions that it is hard to tell where one stops and the other begins.

*Published Jan. 21.

*New books are news. Unless otherwise designated, all books reviewed in TIME were published within the fortnight. TIME readers may obtain any book of any U. S. publisher by sending check or money-order to cover regular retail price ($5 if price is unknown, change to be remitted) to Ben Boswell of TIME. 205 East 42nd St., New York City.

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