Gregrannie

GREAT LAUGHTER--Fannie Hurst--Harper ($2.50).

In contemporary sentimental fiction, the benign character of the aged grandmother who holds the family together, counsels the young, comforts the wretched and looks out upon life's kaleidoscopic panorama with eyes dimmed but kindly, has become one of the most popular characters in stock. But in Great Laughter Fannie Hurst has created an aged grandmother who seems destined to end ail aged grandmothers in popular fiction. In comparison with her, the teetering representatives of the oldest generation in the Jalna novels of Mazo de la Roche are just so many leaping adolescents, the doddering Forsytes of John Galsworthy are scarcely of school age. For Fannie Hurst's Gregrannie at the age of a hundred is still managing her fortune, fixing up the grandchildren when they get into those readily-soluble jams that are so common in novels, looking after the great-grandchildren, endowing cancer research and writing a book. Gregrannie takes her meals with the fam ily, makes wisecracks with her offspring, reads French and H. G. Wells's The Out line of History and recalls vividly the death of her mother in 1839, her work as a nurse in the Civil War, and the hard ships in Scotland for the generation "just following the Industrial Revolution of George Ill's reign." To one who had lived through so many wars, talk of the problem of the younger generation seemed foolish. "Death had flown in flocks through Gregrannie. She knew its sounds and stinks. The Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the Boer War, the World War, had taken their toll of her."

Although Author Hurst does not make the point, readers may feel that Gregrannie must have exercised considerable mental agility merely to keep straight in her mind the large family in St. Luke's Place, Manhattan, over which she rules. It is a task likely to strain the patience of readers not half her years. For Gregrannie's daughter, Linda, has borne ten children at the beginning of Great Laughter, and these, with their wives and offspring, make up the cast of the book. One dies, leaving a widow, Carmella, who is beloved by two of the brothers. She bears a son to one of these, Chauncey, who, however, marries the half-witted niece of a political boss to advance his career. (The other, John, marries an Australian girl.) Another grandson fails in his attempt to run a farm; another marries, begins practice as a dentist. The oldest granddaughter, Josie. a trim, efficient business girl, is having a secret love affair with her employer, marries him when his wife and daughter are killed in an automobile wreck. A younger granddaughter, Abbey, works as a schoolteacher, becomes a Communist, emigrates to Russia. Her twin brother, Louis, struggles against his homosexual impulses and becomes a school principal as well as the editor of Gregrannie's unpublished works. For 491 pages Gregrannie observes this crowded scene, until on her hundredth birthday, with her family gathered around her, she is still able to shake like a lost leaf with "immense dreary laughter at what men will sweat for."

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