For Rebinding

AND NOW TOMORROW--Rachel Field--Macmillan ($2.75).

And Now Tomorrow will probably be one of the best-loved novels of the summer. It comfortably exemplifies how little 40 years have changed the rules for those amiable romances, published around the turn of the century, which have worn through several rebindings in provincial libraries. Like them, Miss Field's book has enough carpentry to chair an idle haunch through many hours, enough sincere sentimentality to bring moisture to idle eyes and unguentine to idle hearts. In recognition of changed times, it is tinged with "class-consciousness," but not of a sort to disturb the tenderest digestion.

Emily Blair is the elder daughter of "the royal family" of an old New England textile town. Late in the '20s Emily falls in love with young Harry Collins, and her happiness and his future in the family textile plant seem assured. But life strangely weaves, as Aunt Em remarks, "a sort of pattern." Meningitis suddenly strikes Emily stone deaf; the Depression divides the town into two warring factions. In the clash between labor and capital Emily feels for both sides. ("There it was, I thought, the word 'they' that we all took refuge in. It would always crop up to foster hate and misunderstanding.") She also begins to take ear treatments from young Dr. Vance.

Suddenly Emily's little world is tumbling about her ears: for Harry and her madcap sister Janice are in love. Emily's talent for self-deceit teases off the denouement to a point where New Year bells are ringing, a strike boils over, a greathearted young organizer is killed by his own men, and Emily learns not only to hear again but to realize that she has been trying to shackle an unwilling fiance with her deafness.

By the end she has, thanks to her suffering, come a long way past her spoiled, too-sheltered girlhood. That is her own opinion, anyhow; some readers may feel rather that suffering, if it is to pay dividends, requires a sufferer. They may also feel that Emily's perceptions of Blairstown's social anguish are less Sophoclean than benevolently cross-eyed. But her sincerity and her delusions of self-knowledge, which the author appears wholeheartedly to share with her, will make Emily seem real and dear to thousands.

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