- October 24, 1925 rT ------------------ WINNETKA TALK 25 Esther fh Are You Interested in books of Fiction, Biography, Travel, o» His- tory? For lists write to ESTHER GOULD c/o your local paper. PATHOS AND STRENGTH "THE PERENNIAL BACHELOR" By Anne Parrish Harper & Brothers Anne Parrish has written a start- lingly real novel in her "The Peren- nial Bachelor," winner of the Harper Prize Novel Contest for this year. In a style which is remarkably light and delicate for the intensity of her subject, she has painted a picture of the most poignant tragedy. So an etcher, using the most delicate line, can by many reiterations of that line create effects of deepest shadow. It is thus that Miss Parrish has done her book. Taking a situation that is all light and happiness in the beginning she puts in a line here, a line there, until every- thing is in shadow. The Campion family are a wealthy happy respected old family of Dela- ware. The children, three girls, and a boy born soon after the story opens, have every reason to look forward to the most normal and delightful lives. The only shadow on their first years is the sudden death, by a fall from a horse, of their laughing generous father, just before the heir for whom he has hoped so passionately, is born. But this is a shadow only long pres- ent, it seems, to Maggie the eldest daughter. Thus the family fortunes are left in the hands of the utterly incompetent, senseless and charming Mrs. Campion. And Mrs. Campion, being a slave to the stronger sex, transfers her allegiance, on her husband's death to "little Vic- tor." It is for little Victor that the family lives, moves and has its being. And little Victor grows up as can be imagined. Each decision at it comes is decided for Victor's interests and each decision is of course fatally wrong. The fam- ily fortunes begin to dwindle, suitors are turned away because Victor does not approve of them--or anyone who might usurp one of his slaves. Grad- vally the family drifts into becoming one of those pitiful groups of people holding up toward the world a false front of impregnability which is no more stable or more credible than the painted front of a stage setting. The book is almost unbearably poignant, because it is so true. The women are so exactly what the world of fifty or sixty years ago made its women, Victor is so exactly what such women made of him. Miss Parrish showed the final touch of artistry when instead of making Victor bad or vicious she made him simply ineffectual. Poor Victor, like all the rest of his family such a pitiful victim of life! James Cherry, 422 Abbottsford road, Kenilworth is away for a few weeks vacationing in Mississippi and Tennes- see where he is visiting friends. An exciting novel of love and adventure in Haiti 2°° Brentano's -- Chicago MR. WALPOLE DESCENDS "THE PORTRAIT OF A MAN WITH RED HAIR" By Hugh Walpole George H. Doran Hugh Walpole has turned necro- mancer. Evidently wearied of his good solid reputation and his faithful fol- lowers, he has decided to vary the gen- eral monotony by doing a little juggling with the former and giving a little jolt to the latter. In any case it is difficult to picture why Mr. Walpole wrote "The Portrait of a Man with Red Hair." When there were so many new direc- tions in which to turn, why tufn in this? Charles Percy Harkness, an Amer- ican of Puritan ancestry and Baker, Oregan, contemporaries, is travelling to Treliss, England, in search of beauty. He is a timid young man, as afraid of himself as he is of everything else-- and he would have been more afraid yet if he had known what was in store for him. He does have a warning and nearly turns and runs, but is stayed by a new sense of courage. Here in Treliss, which is indeed the village of his dreams, he encounters also the girl of his dreams, but in great distress. Married to an inhuman skeleton-like man, she is terrified of her father-in-law, who is, we soon dis- cover, a maniac with sadist tendencies. Well might the girl be afraid. And so are we--but for Mr. Walpole's good sense not for her well-being, because the story hasn't enough reality to make us worry much about that. Then we go on through scenes of fire and daring, ending with the tor- ture chamber in which the man with Just Publishea the first novel In three years by the author of IF WINTER COMES ONE INCREASING PURPOSE As MAEGINSON 129° at all Booksellers LITTLE, BROWN & COMPANY = Publishers. Boston : [ the red hair is cutting up--literally--his ivictims. Then, at last comes the mo- ment, the best in the book, for which we have been waiting. One of the victims breaks away, and picking up the man, hair and all, drops him out of the window of his own tower and he falls, plump, like a pudding, on the rocks below. There is skill in the story, yes, but used on such an unpleasant and un: real subject, how useless it seems! A. A. MILNE'S WHEN WE WERE VERY YOUNG Can now be had in a Gift Edi- tion on special paper with a por- trait of Christopher Robin. It is boxed with a gay Christmas card, ready for your use. Price $3.00. E. P. Dutton & Co. New York SINCLAIR LEWIS $2.00 ARROWSMITH "One of the best novels ever written in America." --H. L. Mencken. Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York Mats Does the world belong to the man who can't see a joke? Ammiel couldn't take life seriously. All he wanted was to sit still and smile at the world as it bustled by...and then it wouldn't let him...Read this book about a man who stumbled over his own sense of humor. 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