Book Notes

THE SUNDOWNERS--Ward Dorrance --Scrlbner ($2.50).

Where the Rivers Meet (1939) established Ward Dorrance as a leisurely, competent novelist of the Missouri country where he was born. This book is just as leisurely. At the end of Noel Deslauriers' long, reflective childhood, his mother and grandmother were killed by a tornado. Noel's grandfather took for his second wife a coarse, managing woman who turned Noel off the farm. Bravely, Noel tried to make himself into a St. Louis businessman, realized at last that it was no use, returned to the land. Ostensibly the story of a boy growing up on a prosperous farm, The Sundowners owes its peculiar flavor to rich, meditative asides on dogs, horses, foxes, possum-hunting, night fishing, local dialect.

WHEN THE STONES BEGIN TO DANCE-- Aben Kandel--Duell ($2).

A Hollywood, or painless, treatment of the same subject as Leftist Michael Gold's Jews Without Money. An elderly Rumanian named Mr. Marco is the acknowledged patriarch of the pushcart market and adjacent tenements under Manhattan's Williamsburg Bridge. Shrewd as Solomon and benign as an Easter bunny, Mr. Marco spends his days getting evicted tenants restored to their rooms, destitute European refugees set up in the pushcart business. But eventually a real-estate company razes the tenements and disperses the pushcarts. At a last neighborhood party, brightened by his market-place alumni who have grown rich, Mr. Marco has a long conversation with a courtly old party who turns out--in a sudden accession of fantasy--to be Death.

NEARER THE EARTH--Beatrice Borst--Random ($2.50).

This is a story of a girl who learns, through a series of harsh disillusionments, that what she called "clinging to her ideals" was really a mulish effort to hang on to a happy childhood. As a first novel (winner of the Avery Hopwood Award) it is mature and thoughtful, except in technique. In it drinks are always "refreshing," blouses are always "dainty." The story accumulates as undramatically as polyps on a coral reef, but in the end it makes a pretty fair shipwreck.

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