It's a Woman's World

TOMORROW WILL BE BETTER (274 pp.) --Betty Smith--Harper ($3).

For her second novel, Betty Smith has returned to the community she made famous in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. But she has not written so good a novel.

Tomorrow Will Be Better is the story of Margy Shannon of Maujer Street, the plainly dressed, neatly combed daughter of a factory worker, of her loves, job and marriage, the tragedy of her life (her child is born dead), and the beginning of her separation from her husband. It is so flatly written and so free of melodrama (or even of exciting incidents) that its interest is surprising--without plot and without particular distinction in its prose, with characters who seem merely to have wandered on the scene, it is nevertheless absorbing.

Kid Sister. Part of the reason is that the reader knows so much about Margy Shannon. What he learns of her is not what he ordinarily learns of the heroine of a romance, but the sort of information (with a few additions) one has about one's sister. The experience is less like reading a novel than it is like living in the same house with the girl. If she were not a nice girl to have around, the book would be intolerable. She is delightful, not in the sense of being winsome or charming, but in the sense of being authentic and of being entirely unaware of the reader's presence in the room.

Margy began going with Frankie Malone knowing he wasn't much. "But he was better than nobody. He would have served until a real boy friend came along." Frankie was the son of a policeman who tried to toughen him up by making him go out and fight with the boys. He grew up with an abiding fear of being a sissy, sensitive, selfconscious, a good dancer, a hard worker, ashamed of his family and relentlessly honest with himself. He met Margy at a soda fountain where they both lingered because neither of them wanted to go home to their quarreling families.

When he proposed he said: " 'I'm earning twenty-two a week and I've got nearly two hundred dollars in the Bushwick Savings Bank . . . I've never horsed around with women. You're the first girl I was ever serious about. Maybe you could do better--a girl like you. But you could do a lot worse than taking me . . .' Thus he laid his meager shining life before her."

Married Woman. By 10:30 every morning, Margy had the housework finished and nothing to do the rest of the day. She read novels, kept a budget, visited her mother twice each week, and missed the talk of the girls in the office. Soon after she married, Margy found her husband was passive to her. " 'The whole trouble,' she told herself bluntly, 'is that I'm a married woman and don't get to sleep enough with my husband.' "

Husband. This seems to place the responsibility on Frankie. He is, however, the weakest character in the novel. The world that Betty Smith pictures is entirely feminine--a world into which a perception of masculine motives makes its way with the utmost difficulty. The mystery of her husband's life is not why he does not respond to her, but why he ever married her at all. "Don't get me wrong," he tells her. "I don't want to go around sleeping with fellers. I . . . I don't want to sleep with anybody. That's about the way it is."

This may do as abnormal psychology, but Betty Smith does not make it convincing as an explanation of Frankie. Her failure with the character of Frankie does much to destroy any claim that Tomorrow Will Be Better might make toward being serious fiction, a claim to which its honest portrait of an ordinary American girl might otherwise entitle it.

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