Crisis on Main Street

WHAT PEOPLE SAID--W. L. White-- Viking ($2.75).

Nearly 20 years ago Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson and a score of lesser authors made their reputations by dramatizing the deadly influence of Main Street's narrow, inhibited middle-class culture. What has been happening on Main Street in the last hardbreathing decade of boom and depression? The single serious attempt to find out has been Robert & Helen Lynd's brilliant sociological study, Middle town in Transition (TIME, April 19). On the surface, reported the Lynds, the cultural pattern of Main Street in 1935 appeared to be intact. But the pattern showed significant new bulges.

Last week What People Said, a 614-page, dramatic first novel, laid in imaginary Athena, Oklarada. offered the first work of fiction to tempt comparison with Middletown in Transition. On the surface Author White's Main Street still looks much as it did in Main Street and Babbitt. Like Sinclair Lewis. Author White gives no solution for Main Street's inhibiting culture, offers no antagonist capable of creating a better one. But Author White's novel carries an undercurrent, nowhere found in Lewis' books, of those acute undersurface tensions detected by the Lynds.

Main characters of What People Said are drawn from two of Athena's leading families. Idealistic Charles Aldington Carrough is a famed country editor and Progressive. His closest friend is persuasive, charming Banker Isaac Norssex. Their sons share the family friendship. Lee Norssex goes into his father's bank. Junior Carrough, a Rhodes Scholar, goes to work on his father's newspaper, marries a shrewd New York newspaper woman, is elected to the State legislature. Occasionally he backs some bond legislation or kills a news story at Lee's suggestion.

A bank examiner discovers that the secret of Lee's success is heavy bond forgery. It is the end of his career, but only half of What People Said. The rest of the story unfolds the scope of Lee's crookedness, which runs like a sulphurous fuse from Banker Norssex to the Progressive Governor's Mansion. According to Junior and his wife, it sputters just as stinkingly in the homes of the suddenly "unbearably honest" Oklaradans, since they tolerate a society that breeds embezzlers and hypocrites, as it breeds the unemployed who snarl so ominously in Athena's ears. But such talk is only between Junior and his wife. Publicly they hold their tongues, not wishing to wreck the paper.

When the Norssex case breaks, Editor Carrough is in the Orient. Junior is relieved because he imagines his father, if he had been in Athena, would have stuck his neck out to defend his old friend. But when Editor Carrough returns, and is asked to use his personal influence to lighten old man Norssex' stiff sentence, he keeps his neck as firmly in his collar as any other Athena businessman.

The Author. Round-faced, mild-mannered William Lindsay White resembles his famed father, Kansas Editor William Allen White. But of his father's homey writing on Midwestern small-town life Author White's novel shows no trace. Born 37 years ago in Emporia, Kansas (five years after his father bought the Emporia Gazette), Author White well knows the Midwest he writes about. He knows other environments as well. At 18 his father took him to the Versailles Peace Conference. Graduated from Harvard in 1924, after a year at the University of Kansas, Author White spent the next ten years on his father's newspaper. Varying his work as reporter, he made several trips to Europe, served a term (1931-32) in the Kansas legislature, in 193 2 was Republican County Chairman. Kansans who remember the Finney scandal (1933) will recognize where his book's material came from.

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