FICTION

Conflict

CONFLICT--Olive Higgins Prouty --Houghton Mifflin (2). The life of Sheilah Miller is a conflict between the violent superficial distaste and the deep, deeply contradictory love which she feels for Felix Nawn. She marries him for martyrdom and her conflict continues; now it is between , her longing for Roger Dallenger and the old torturous instinct to protect the weaknesses of Felix. When Felix learns that the theft which he committed so that he could buy her a car is going to be exposed, he finds the tardy courage to commit suicide. Roger, about to propose to another girl, hears of his death and the story reaches its unnecessarily happy conclusion. Despite the weakening of the last 100 pages, the adolescent anguish of Sheilah Milter is so acutely albeit theatrically probed, that Conflict is undeniably a powerful successor to Author Prouty's famed novel, later cinema, Stella Dallas.

Kitty

KITTY--Warwick Deeping-- Knopf ($2). Sex, sentimentality, simplicity--the formula upon which Author Deeping constructed his first best seller Sorrel and Son, his second best seller Doomsday, is, in this opus, not so much complicated by the more difficult factors of good storytelling and sound characterization. In the story of Kitty, a shopgirl, Alex St. George, who marries her, and Clara St. George, his tigerish mother, there is a return to the maudlinity that kept Author Deeping so long upon the lists of the unheralded. Probably even the fact that Alex St. George is a British soldier will not serve to excuse his habit of seizing his wife and making to her "a passionate, dear murmuring," on three separate occasions. Nor will the fact that Author Deeping has become a notable writer by the virtues of his previous books serve to excuse the sloppy writing with which he has crowded this one.

Mad Carews

The Story.* Easy-going Pa Bowers, a Minnesota farmer, was always having to sell more land to his wealthy neighbors, the Carews, in order to meet last month's bills. Once, the Carews forgot a payment, and the Bowers could not afford a new windmill, so Reef Bowers, pluperfect son, climbed up to fix the old one in the dark-- that is where the story opens, with Reef lying in the farmhouse, "dreaming of pain." Downstairs, little Elsa Bowers decides to hate the Carews forever, especially Bayliss Carew, whose "cheeks and lips were like a raspberry. The Carew boy was a raspberry. Elsa giggled a little."

But the Carews are a mad tribe. There is pirate blood in their veins, repeating itself with fine atavism. Hate later turns to vicious admiration when Elsa sees Bayliss theatrically sitting a new pony, making it rear, yanking it up until there is scarleted froth on its bit irons. He goes to college, to war, to the devil; returns, as he says of one of his girls-- healthy, clean, pretty. And his tribe dominates the landscape, roistering, riding hard. They have always succeeded, always dominated, always failed, in a hot-blooded cycle: "The Carew men have always taken what they wanted, where they wanted it," says fiercely indomitable Hildreth Carew, the present family leader. Eventually Bayliss, attracted no doubt by Elsa's passionate coolness towards him, desires her. "I don't want to fight with you--we've always done that--but I'd rather fight with you than love any other woman I've ever known. I didn't know that till I got away from you--till I had nothing but the memory of that faint blue vein running down your cheek."

Elsa excused herself, told herself the union was for practical reasons. If she had been willing to go on as a grubbing farm girl, she insisted in her thoughts, she would have married an employe of the Carews, an eerie cowboy with a magic guitar whose dynamic physique had created a great longing in her. Bayliss meant external luxury, and she took him in form only. But the capitulation of sensitive women to such men as the Mad Carews is as inevitable as the failure of crops in Elders Hollow, the Bowers' poor farm land, be the men tenfold as wild and intangible as Bayliss is. In fact, it was when she thought Bayliss was consoling himself with a Bohemian girl that Elsa ran hysterically down the hill to him, and thus their marriage became a verity.

Meanwhile the Carews come to their cyclic catastrophe, involve others in business failure. Led by the little flames in the eyes of Chieftainess Hildreth, they close their mansion, departing for fights elsewhere. And Bayliss, onetime representative of the mad tribe, joins Elsa's revolt against it, settles down to work, scandal, pettiness, apparently compensated by love alone. Therefore the story is of Bayliss and Elsa, their happiness--not of the Carews who form its flaming red-&-yellow background.

The Significance. The book may not be dismissed with the remark that it is Author Ostenso's third creative bull's-eye. The Mad Carews is a good book; it stands alone.

Some critics cry that here is built up a tragedy, weakened by a happy ending; but the happiness is a realistic accident arising out of the destruction of youth's defiant assuredness. Poetic writing, sensibility to the relationship between men and Nature, insight into the illogicality of human action, human destiny, project the reader into the inscrutable problems and emotions of life, receive critical praise.

The Author. Martha Ostenso was born in Norway, brought to Winnipeg at the age of 3, to Brooklyn at 20, when she began writing. A little known book of verse, the prize-winning Wild Geese and The Dark Dawn are her last five years' productions. She lives and writes now, secluded in an old house on the New Jersey Palisades, makes yearly pilgrimages to Minnesota for family reunions and for material.

*THE MAD CAREWS--Martha Ostenso-- Dodd, Mead-- (|2.50).