New Books

The following estimates of books muck in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion:

SAYONARA --John Paris --Boni & Liveright ($2.00). Another Rain, in a Japanese setting: geisha girls, Anglican bishops, cherry blossoms, suicide. The author of the controversial Kimono has again scratched off the customary Oriental glamour and uncovered a realistic--at times amusing, at times sordid--picture of Japanese life. Beneath the rather melodramatic narrative runs an undercurrent of real seriousness, a sense of inscrutable, unconquerable differences between East and West, a shadow of the intangible fatalism of the Orient that is at once its peril and its charm.

PRANCING NIGGER-Ronald Firbank --Brentano ($2.00). With such a title, the reader knows what to expect. He is not disappointed, for he is soon afloat in a sea of fantastic nonsense. Purporting to be a study of British West Indian life and manners, this book leaves one with a dizzying sense of relief that the British West Indies are far away. Carl Van Vechten's whimsical preface proclaims Firbank to be the "only authentic master of the light touch, a man who might be writing with his eyelashes or the tips of his polished finger-nails." Which may all be. Indeed, it is as good an explanation as any.

THESE CHARMING PEOPLE--Michael Arlen--Doran ($2.50). A whimsical satire of ultra-fashionable British "society," to be put on the shelf along with Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson. For instance, there is one sketch, about a gentleman who had been "a millionaire until the War broke out, when he at once became a multimillionaire. He was offered a knighthood for his services on the field of finance, but humbly refused the honor in a letter which, his newspapers said, should be a historic model for all letters refusing knighthoods. Later on he refused a baronetcy in the same simple and sincere way. But at length he accepted a barony, excusing himself on the ground that he was getting too old for letter-writing." There is another, about a Lord who was "wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice; he was, in fact, so wealthy that Mr. Otto Kahn stood at attention when speaking to him and Mr. John D. Rockefeller burnt his tongue with his hot milk at the mere mention of his name." According to his publishers, Author Arlen, aged 25, "likes dancing and baccarat and is a tournament tennis player." He summers between Deauville and Biarritz, winters on the Riviera, springs in Venice, autumns in Mayfair.