Quiet, Please

HUDSON RIVER BRACKETED--Edith Wharton--Appleton ($2.50). Vance Weston, son of a small-town real-estate operator who has made, not a "pile" exactly but a neat mound, feels immortal longings in him. He writes poetry and learns about a small part of life from a wanton wench. When he catches his own grandfather with the same clay-footed goddess, the shock brings on an attack of typhoid. When he is convalescent, his family are so relieved at his recovery that they humor his literary ambition and let him go east. In a sleepy little village on the Hudson he boards with his impoverished cousins, the Tracys, and discovers an old house, the Lorburn family mansion, built in the early 19th Century style of "Hudson River Bracketed." Vance runs the usual gamut of the literarily ambitious small-town boy; he discovers that he is no poet, goes home to Euphoria, gets a job on the local newspaper. But his ambition will not be downed: three years later he gets back to Manhattan on the strength of one published story, marries his Tracy cousin, is mildly lionized by literary society, has a succes d'estime with his first novel. His wife dies. Author and reader leave him desolate, planning to return once again to his native Middle West; but he will go on writing; his day will come.

Contrasted with Vance and his native thirst for literature are Halo and Lewis Tarrant, products of the civilized and cosmopolitan world which Mrs. Wharton knows and likes the best. But in this story she has given her favorites the meagerer parts. Vance's honest bluntness is thrown into even bolder relief by their futile sophistication, their self-deluding cleverness.

Mrs. Edith Newbold Jones Wharton, intelligent, fastidious, urbane, believes in quietness, good manners, breeding. On the whole, she is on the side of the respectable angels, but she will not shout about it.

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