Ham to Spam

MORNING JOURNEY (345 pp.)--James Hilton--Little, Brown ($3).

"He had been left money and a job by his father, a Wall Street man of the old school, while his mother had contributed good looks and . . . innate good tastes in the arts. Education at Groton and Harvard had followed, after which there had been years of hard work. In 1920, aged 36, he had married a New Hampshire girl who loved horses and dogs ... so he had bought some land in Connecticut and there they had spent much of each year . . . In 1925 she had died in an influenza epidemic, leaving a boy of three named Norris . . . During school holidays, when Norris was at home, he sometimes took the boy to places like the Metropolitan Museum and the Statue of Liberty."

When fans of fast fiction see a paragraph of this kind lumbering up the page like something escaped from an old copy of Who's Who, they usually skip lightly over it and take up again at a point where the going is not quite so statuesque. The trouble with James Hilton's new novel is that anybody who tries to skip such dull parts will be obliged to skip the whole book.

Morning Journey is totally unlike Novelist Hilton's big hits, Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Lost Horizon. It is the story of a stage-struck Irish colleen named Carey, who pines for stardom and is raised to it by a producer who is a theatrical genius. He also marries Carey, but, like all geniuses in fiction, is too much of a heel to toe the married line. So Carey swaps him for a likable millionaire--only to conclude, after a couple of hundred pages of tightly packed pondering, that the path of genius, however rough, is preferable to Wall Street.

In Novelist Hilton's hands, this plot goes from ham to Spam. Had he shown but a spark of Carey's fondness for drama, Morning Journey might have turned into as much of a grassfire as Mr. Chips and Lost Horizon. As it is, readers can only look on with morbid fascination while Novelist Hilton earnestly lights the fires of one dramatic episode after another and then, swiftly dropping his matches and snatching up a fire bucket, pours suffocating streams of cold water over the struggling flames.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.