Books: Klieg Flowers

THE DARK WOOD (303 pp.)—Christine Weston—Scribner ($2.75).

Christine Weston was born & bred in what the Literary Guild—which has made her new novel its September selection—calls “Gandhi’s country” (India), where her French father was an indigo planter. In 1923 she married an American, came to live in Warren G. Harding’s country. Twenty years after, Indigo (TIME, Nov. 15, 1943), her fourth novel, brought Author Weston a degree of prestige and profit.

The Dark Wood, which ran as a serial in the Ladies Home Journal, will bring her a lot more profit, but little prestige. The Literary Guild and Publisher Scribner have made a first printing of 825,000 copies, and 20th Century-Fox (which paid $210,000 for the story) is already at work on the movie version. The twin themes of The Dark Wood are timely: 1) What does a soldier do when he comes home from war and finds his wife has left him for another man? 2) What does a war widow do to erase the memory of her dead husband?

Like many novels that aim at the nerve ends of a whole nation, The Dark Wood is undeniably sincere in intention, but in the telling is pat and unconvincing. Author Weston has strong and respectful feelings for the abandoned soldier and the miserable widow—but her slick answer to their despair is to have them meet accidentally and fall in love, because the lonely soldier reminds the lonely widow of her dead lusband. Though The Dark Wood has its cold-blooded villain and villainess, most of the characters are treated as normal, unheroic people of the 20th Century —with the difference that their faces seem always to turn, like flowers to the sun, toward the klieg lights of Hollywood.