Flexible Father

BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW--Charles G.

Norris--Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

In 1915 round-faced, dapper Charles Oilman Norris quit his job as a magazine editor and wrote a novel. He was galled because his chief claim to fame was that he was the husband of Kathleen Norris and the younger brother of the late, famed Frank Norris (McTeague, The Octopus).

He has since written nine (to Wife Kathleen's 60), dealing with such topical problems as education (Salt), marriage (Brass), women in business (Bread), birth control (Seed). They have brought him neither the literary reputation of his brother nor the big profits of his wife. But they have been moderately good, moderately successful, have kept him from being known as simply "Kathleen Norris' husband." Bricks Without Straw takes the topical theme of Radical Youth. Son of a strait-laced Midwest banker, likable, 20-year-old Jerry Kennedy went to Manhattan in 1904, fell in love with a beautiful music student named Connie, married her in spite of his family's bigoted objection to her Catholicism. Then he lost his job and his father refused to send any money.

He had to take his wife home to live with his parents, go to work in his father's bank. After a year of that, Connie left him for good.

Last half of the story shows Jerry, 20 years later, now head of the bank, long since dutifully married to a good, dull wife. Determined that his five children shall have the things he missed--a decent allowance and tolerant understanding--he successfully conceals his shock when they get drunk, when his oldest son confesses to having a mistress. With heroic effort he swallows his chagrin when his favorite daughter goes off to Hollywood, returns pregnant but unmarried. But when two of his children confess they are Reds.

Jerry blows up. His friend the Judge takes a calmer view, says that all good conservatives were red-hot radicals in their youth. At last Jerry downs this bitter pill too, grants the young vipers his blessing, if not his comprehension, as they leave to join an ambulance corps in Loyalist Spain.

As middle-aged observation on contemporary youth, Bricks Without Straw belongs in a category with Sinclair Lewis' The Prodigal Parents, Howard Spring's My Son, My Son! Compared with the jaundiced eyes of Lewis or the rheumy ones of Howard Spring, Author Norris' eyes seem cool-sighted. His calm view comes partly of his studied concern always to see both sides of Problems: partly, it may be due to the fact that the Norrises have brought up several nephews and nieces, kept open house for a dozen others who swarm uninhibited over the Norris ranch at the foot of the Santa Cruz mountains.

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