New Novels

Last month marked a high point in the spring book season, saw 106 new novels published. Of varied merit, the following four ranked above most:

JUBAL TROOP--Paul I. Wellman--Carrick & Evans ($2.75). A first novel, this has two distinctions: 1) Author Wellman, newspaperman and ex-cowboy, is a Western historian, author of an excellent study of Indian war, Death in the Desert; 2) his Jubal Troop makes a fortune instead of leading a romantic life among scenes of gun play, escape, cattle rustling, prospecting, big-time gambling. Author Wellman's gratuitous moral: Jubal Troop's money-grabbing did not pay.

THE HEROES--Millen Brand--Simon & Schuster ($2). Two years ago Millen Brand's The Outward Room gave 100,000 readers a large lump in their throats. That simple, moving story described the redemption of a forgotten girl through the loving sympathy of a good man. The Heroes, slighter and non-lump-raising, describes the redemption of a forgotten man through the loving sympathy of a good girl. A plotless, subdued story it is laid in a New England Soldiers' Home, the apathy of whose inmates casts a pall over the novel.

CHILDREN OF GUERNICA -- Hermann Kesten--Alliance ($2.50). On April 26, 1937, a row comes to a head in the large Espinosa family of Guernica, Spain; Uncle Pablo, the black sheep, mocks his kindly brother for his liberalism in the civil war; son and daughter are innocently involved in the murder of an anarchist leader; Father Espinosa cannot sell his chemist's shop and escape to France. German bombers sailing overhead end the family row and the Basque city of Guernica at the same time. Young Carlos escapes to Paris where he tells his powerful, grim story to German refugee Author Kesten, and decides not to commit suicide but to sit in judgment on "all the smug, indifferent people on earth."

THE HOLY TERROR--H. G. Wells--Simon & Schuster ($2.75). Most of H. G. Wells's 80 books have pictured the shape of things to come; if nobody knows what the future holds, it is not his fault. In The Holy Terror he sees the same old Wellsian future: the final World War, a world dictatorship, and at last, off in the misty distance, the World State. Many an oldster bores mankind about the past; in The Holy Terror, Wells manages to be dull about things that have not even happened.

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