Books: Hoosier's Maine*

MIRTHFUL HAVEN—Booth Tarkington—Doubleday, Doran ($2).

Booth Tarkington has never been a socially weighty writer, but his early books had a kind of restless threat in them. His sympathies were evidently with the young man who rebels against the machinery of money. As Tarkington grew older his sympathy with rebels thinned, mellowed or changed into a kind of bantering, gentle satire that implied less of particular criticism than of general tolerance. But in his latest book the criticism is less implied, more explicit, than ever before; his satire less tolerant, less gentle.

The scene...