Trilogy's End

A HOUSE DIVIDED--Pearl S. Buck--Day ($2.50).

Last year Mrs. Buck interrupted her labors on her Chinese trilogy, which began with the best-selling Good Earth and continued into Sons, to write the story of an elemental Chinese woman, The Mother. Now she has returned to complete the trilogy with a novel that many a reader will consider below the level of her best work.

A House Divided quits the Chinese hinterland of peasant and warlord for an unnamed treaty port and for the life of a Chinese student in the U. S. Wang Yuan, son of Wang the Tiger of Sons, is part of the ferment of the "new China" of Sun Yatsen.

An onlooker hating violence, Yuan plays no vital part in the revolution that brought Chiang Kai-shek to Nanking. Mrs. Buck's faintly archaic Biblical rhythms, so well-adapted to the peasant and patriarchal life of an older China, falter when she tries to suggest the clutter of the coastal cities and the amazement of a young Chinese in the U. S. Her style has been compared by her more enthusiastic followers to the prose of the King James Bible. Critic Stark Young has attempted to put the quietus to this claim by printing some of Pearl Buck and some of the King James Bible in parallel columns.

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