FICTION: Flatland Dreamer

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SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY—Dawn Powell—'Brentano ($2.50). There is a theory, which many U. S. writers and critics clasp tightly in their teeth, that the Great American Novel will come, like young Lochinvar, out of the Great Middle West. As a result, the saga of Gopher Prairie has been rewritten backward, forward, and on the head of a pin. In its latest form it is the story, mainly, of Dorrie Shirley, a sensitive little girl who had a warm disposition, a prim and unsympathetic sister called Linda, and a grandmother called "Aunt Jule," who ran a ramshackle hotel in an Ohio village.

Dorrie Shirley sat up in the garret with the oldest lodger in the hotel listening to him read; or she watched, with fascinated interest, the two-a-day theatrical folk, the bawdy country wenches, the flabby townspeople, the cheap sports who came to lodge at Aunt Jule's place. She was terrified when she saw the loveliest lady who had ever stayed at the inn, lying in a disheveled bed, beside the town drunkard. She helped Linda get the smooth slick townboy that her sister had always loved; and she observed with hurt wonder and dismay the way her own high-school boy friends turned away from her as they grew old enough to appreciate the fact that her guardian ran a fairly disreputable boarding place. When the old lodger in the garret died, his grandson came west from Harvard. He was what Dorrie had wanted and she, apparently, suited him. At the end of the story, it is a comparatively safe guess that Dorrie will come to Manhattan, get her poems published and write a novel whose heroine is a dreamy little girl called Dawn Powell.

She Walks in Beauty runs true to type; but it is a sincere book and one that has hunger in it, an important quality and a rare one in flatland fiction. When Author Dawn Powell misdescribes her

Harvard man hero, you feel she does it because she, like Dorrie, had a longing for and a misconception of the East and its people. Dorrie, to be sure, is perhaps the kind of girl who would be pleased if someone called her a dreamer of dreams. But so, almost certainly, is Author Powell; and it is very pleasant, now, when most first-novelists are either rabid and wild-eyed sophisticates or intellectual inverts with empty heads, to read what has been written by someone who is neither ashamed or proud of naivete, who carries in her mind the torture of youth more brightly than its touch. The book is as interesting as a secret; it is too bad that Author Powell speaks on page 6 of Aunt Jule's "black hair piled in sleek coils" and on page 191 of Aunt Jule remembering "her hair, golden like Linda's . . ." but only people who read books in bed instead of on the subway will notice such trivial but important discrepancies. '^