Books: Fifty Man Years

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The last six weeks roughly marked the peak of the fall book season. In that time appeared about 50 novels, representing the labor of about 50 man years. TIME has reviewed the best seven. The remainder have given employment to hundreds of publishers' minions. They will give diversion to thousands of readers. Craftwork rather than Art, they fall into several time-smoothed categories:

Fascism v. democracy is their favorite, though only a brand new reader of novels would find anything new on the subject. In the worst of them, Charles Francis Stocking's Out of the Dust (Maestro, Chicago, $2.75), an American in Germany huffs & puffs through an interminable, blowhard melodrama. Frances Parkinson Keyes's The Great Tradition (Messner, $2.50) pictures in drawing room prose the democratic gropings of a German-U. S. aristocrat in Germany and revolutionary Spain. A cut above them is W. Townend's Rescue of Captain Leggatt (Morrow, $2.50), naively melodramatizing the enmity and brotherly reconciliation of a British and a German sea captain.

U. S. anti-fascist novels, written at 3,000 miles removed from fascist reality, are too often the sort which make a Führer out of every bully. James T. Farrell's Jew-hating young Brooklyn Irishman, a bellicose introvert who sells Father Moylan's Christian Justice, is a convincing individual in Tommy Gallagher's Crusade (Vanguard, $1), but the tract-like limitations of the story are implicit in the original title: Tommy Gallagher—American Storm Trooper. Mari Sandoz's third book, Capital City (Little, Brown, $2.50), lacks even a credible character. A panoramic, pamphlet-pat story of imminent fascism in a Midwest State capital, it is little more than a leftwing city guide, mainly suggests that Author Sandoz writes much better about such intimate subjects as her father (Old Jules).

Historical novels still supply a big share, and bigger bulk, of any season's second-raters. Among the most recent batch of ten, the following are typical:

If Not Victory—Frank 0. Hough—Carrick & Evans ($2.50). A heroineless, fact-footed tale about a young Quaker farmer who turns Continental scout.

Michael Beam—Richard Matthews Hallet—Houghton Mifflin ($2.50). As in many another recent frontier romance, Michael Beam likes Indians better and his creator writes more cautiously than used to be the case.

Artillery of Time—Chard Powers Smith—Scribner ($2.75). An undisciplined whopper (853 pages) about two New York State farm boys, one of whom carries the ball for rising U. S. industrialism (in the '50s and '60s), the other for democratic idealism.

The Torguts—W. L. River—Stokes ($2.50). Based on the migration of the Torgut Mongols from the Volga to their Chinese homeland in 1771, this long, stiff-jointed "epic" leaves a picture of vast hordes, no individuals.

To the End of the World—Helen C. White — Macmillan ($2.50). The vicissitudes of an idealistic young Catholic priest in the French Revolution. Studious and devout, it will most interest Roman Catholic readers.