Odor of Soap

EXPERIMENT--Helen Hull--Coward, McCann ($2.50).

This book consists of four short novels.

1) In With the One Coin for Fee two aging women, girlhood friends, meet after many years as 1938's New England hurricane blows up. One is at the end of a sexually avid and shameless career; the other is a spinster who jealously despises her. They die in the hurricane, reconciled.

2) In Food for Thought an indigent young professor, almost parted from his wife, his sons, his frowsy household, by a first flirtatious glimpse of suburban high life, is cured because he has a bad time at a high life dinner.

3) In Snow in Summer a Michigan dentist's wife wins a prize for a novel, goes in innocence to Manhattan, suffers cruel treatment at the hands of literary racketeers, returns to find her once secure family at the brink of disruption.

4) In Experiment the brief return home of a young man of proved genius brings on a family reunion, throws his relatives some into sad, some into bitter reflection upon the three frustrate generations it took to produce him.

Taken as wholes, each of these stories is almost as warm, as living, as persuasive, as if a first-rate writer had written them. But they have a woman-magazine-overtone, a sort of moral odor of Ivory Soap which gets oppressive. Thus tuned for housewives, the high quotient of safe-and-sane marriages, superior wives, is notable.

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