Overtaking the Undertaker

Overtaking the Undertaker

A PREFACE TO DEATH--Fred Rother-mell--Little, Brown.

A modern operator of those old-fashioned mills of God which grind so notoriously slowly and even more notoriously small. Author Rothermell in his 14th novel (his first 13 he destroyed) pulverizes his hero to the vanishing point. The somewhat grisly story, which owes debts to Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith, he tells with a workmanlike resolution oddly contrasted with his two chief characters' feckless attitude of laissez faire.

Staring for nights on end from the Northrup University Observatory at galactic matrixes, writing endless papers about the endless stars, has not done the Director's health any good. It has not done Homer Vondorn's marital relations any good either. After a session in the Observatory his fat wife Georgianna, wearing a dress of blue georgette and a choker of garnets, is too great a comedown from the stars. To ease his troubles he takes nip by nip to drink. In the middle of a nightmare of domestic infelicity and over work he wakes up to find he has tuberculosis.

Though his work is the breath of life to Vondorn he has enough wits to realize he must keep his lungs to breathe even that exalted air. He goes off to Rainbow Sanitarium in New Mexico, but his passion for astronomy is greater than his passion for health. He begins to work on his book Toward a New Space. Then two violet-blue eyes, across the sanitarium dining-room table, begin to work on him.

Juno Marin, twice married, has landed in the sanitarium after running the gamut of a gay society in which people ate to live, lived to drink and drank to forget living. In the first flush of their romance Vondorn takes up drinking again, and with that his tale is as good as told. How he and Juno run off to live and decay together in a hut in the desert, how Vondorn slaves at his book, how he visits the nearby Beldoro Observatory, prepares to take up residence with Juno there, is only the long prelude to the ultimate cough that wafts him to sleep under death's starless coverlid.

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