Tableau

SOUTH -- Frederick Wight -- Farrar & Rinehart ($3).

Southern novelists from Stark Young to Erskine Caldwell have written of small sections of their native regions, but have attempted no comprehensive pictures of Southern society as a whole. It has remained for Frederick Wight. Northern portrait painter turned Southern novelist, to offer a long (634 pages), ambitious book in which almost all classes and degrees of Southerners--impoverished blue bloods, fox hunting pretenders, millhands, Negroes, intellectuals--are conscientiously fitted into the fictional picture. The result is somewhat reminiscent of an old-fashioned tableau, with symbolic figures representing Poverty lurking miserably on one side of the stage while heedless Wealth dances with frantic unconcern on the other. An imposing volume, beautifully bound and illustrated with five full-color reproductions of Artist Wight's portraits, South has much to recommend it: careful descriptions of characteristically lovely Southern scenery; sensitive evocations of feminine moods; a number of memorable conversations that are witty even if faked. But these graces are effectively nullified by Artist Wight's dogged determination to cram the whole boiling South into one volume.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.