FICTION: Egotist

AN ARTIST IN THE FAMILY—Sarah Gertrude Millin—Boni & Liveright ($2.50). Every family likes to think that one of it’s children will, some day, become a violinist, a poet or a painter. But if a child grows up and thinks himself a genius when he is really an ineffectual, then there is a fly in the cream pitcher, a tenuous tragedy. Put the ineffectual (Theo Bissaker) on a fruit farm in Verdriet, South Africa, make him physically unable to labor, give him a stupid wife whom he married as a sympathetic gesture and grew to despise—and the cream has indeed been polluted. Theo Bissaker stakes everything on his painting (it is awful). There is no market in South Africa for fitful canvases. Finally, he leaves home, finds a job in the coal mines near Johannesburg. When he hears that his mother is threatened with cancer, he blows off three fingers of his right hand so that he can collect insurance money to send his mother to a reliable doctor in England. That is the end of the story.

Author Millin, who knows her South Africa, has flayed artistic egotism with gentle skill.