Red Menace

THE PRODIGAL PARENTS--Sinclair Lewis --Donbleday, Doran ($2.50).

Two years ago, when Sinclair Lewis published It Can't Happen Here, a miscellaneous group of left-wing writers hailed that anti-Fascist novel with a dinner in a small Italian restaurant on Manhattan's East Side. There in an upstairs room Sinclair Lewis sat at the head of a long table facing a row of radical poets, proletarian novelists and dramatists, defenders of civil liberties, pamphleteers, listening uncomfortably to their speeches that welcomed him to their ranks. Said New Masses Editor Granville Hicks: "When I read Work of Art I wondered--is Red Lewis with us or against us? But when I read It Can't Happen Here, I knew--Lewis is with us."

Last week, if he read Lewis' The Prodigal Parents, Granville Hicks must have been wondering again. A brief, inconsequential book, more typical of Lewis' choppy short stories than of his novels, The Prodigal Parents is notable only for the stern tone it adopts toward the Communist Party and for its sympathetic portrait of the type of U. S. businessman Lewis has previously satirized. The story revolves around the rebellion of Frederick William Cornplow, a plump, prosperous, middle-aged automobile dealer of Sachem Falls, N. Y., who is a dead ringer for Babbitt.

But unlike Babbitt, Fred Cornplow is harassed by two extraordinarily rude, extravagant, self-centred children who almost drive him crazy and then try to lock him in a sanitarium so he can recover the mental balance they have destroyed. Son Howard is a handsome, stupid, unprincipled college boy who is always borrowing money, wrecking his father's cars, and trying to lie his way out. Daughter Sara is a handsome, ill-natured poseur who becomes a Communist, falls in love with an agitator, overdraws her allowance of $1,000 a year and spends most of her time making poisonous remarks about her father. Thus, although it contains the story of Corn-plow's flight to Europe and the eventual reconciliation of his family as a result, most of The Prodigal Parents is given over to scenes in which Howard or Sara bait Cornplow, Cornplow gets mad, the children make wild speeches about youth and Communism and Cornplow answers with speeches defending businessmen. When Cornplow refuses to give $500 to the Spanish government, Sara snarls at him, "Heaven knows I can't give anything with my wretched income," and Cornplow snarls right back, "I know I'm just a millionaire capitalist . . . only I don't expect to contribute for the privilege of being destroyed!" With a dozen of the 40 brief chapters in The Prodigal Parents sounding variations of that theme in varying degrees of abruptness, crudity, animosity, all the characters emerge as too intense to be as funny as the situation warrants. But if it adds nothing to Lewis' reputation as a humorist, The Prodigal Parents makes it reasonably certain that this time there will be no left-wing dinner at which he will listen uncomfortably to the praise of radical critics.

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