Books: The Counterfeiters

THE COUNTERFEITERS—Andre Gide —Alfred A. Knopf ($3). A chief character is the novelist. He describes how he is planning his book; observing characters; taking notes. The book is a story of this planning, broken into bits of narrative, snatches of dialog, description, with constant quotations from the author’s own diary in which he comments on the theory of the novel and the progress of his own. M. Gide is French; his book set in Paris, Switzerland, etc., etc. The book has no story in the accepted sense; is often described by the character-novelist as “a slice of life.” The characters, chiefly young men with intellectual pretensions, occasionally their mistresses, argue and act and idle through its pages much as they would through life. Many critics have acclaimed the book a masterpiece. It is not glib railroad-train reading.