Books: Novel of Character

THE WALSH GIRLS—Elizabeth Janeway—Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

Helen Walsh was pretty, sensitive and warmhearted, and her sister Lydia, seven years older, was watchful, forthright and kind. Hackettston, Conn., where they lived with 9,174 other people much like themselves, was a quiet, ordinary, clean and well-kept town. George Peterson, who married Helen, was a solid businessman who flushed uncomfortably when he admitted his philosophy of life: “It’s worth something just to hear the machines going till 5 o’clock again.”

They were better people than they knew they were. Hackettston was a better place than its citizens understood. They did not know that their lives were exciting.

Readers of The Walsh Girls may feel that Mrs. Janeway does not know it. A careful, detached work of fine craftsmanship, The Walsh Girls is a story of U.S. small-town life in the dreary ’30s, with a glance over the shoulder at Europe. The book is unique among U.S. first novels in that it is strictly a novel of character. So carefully does the author outline each feature in her pictures of Helen, George and Lydia that the book takes on the quality of a preserved family parlor with portraits by Sargent on the walls.

Surf in Her Head. The best feature of The Walsh Girls is its superb characterization of Lydia. Reaching her 40th birthday in the summer of 1935, teacher of high-school English to classes that were now filled with the children of her old school mates, neat, precise, churchgoing, independent, heartbreakingly lonely, she lived alone in the mansion she inherited, an exemplification of the remoteness of the culture she taught from the stirring life around her. Each morning she put on her black hat with a feather on it, her scarf, galoshes, sweater and coat, and went to her class. She earned her $2,100 a year. At night, after she had graded papers, she cooked a chop and potatoes, carried her supper into the big empty dining room, lit the chandelier, put a book beside the plate, and read as she ate, “the flowing sentences combing out her thoughts, resting her mind as delicously as if the sea swept rhythmically through her head.”

$68.03 in the Bank. When George and Helen returned from their Florida honey moon, Lydia was trying to remember that the mortgage was due on the old Walsh home. She sat at her desk by the window and wrote down, “Bank account: $68.03.” The Brazilian bonds she had bought for $3,600 were now worth $313.64. She owed two quarters payment on the principal, plus $150 and interest: at least $750. She talked stiffly to the banker, whose bank had recently passed quietly into the hands of a Boston firm, to her new brother-in-law, who had spent more than he could afford on his honeymoon and whose factory now employed 126 people where it had employed 432 in good times. Then she gave up, sold the house furnishings for $383, packed her trunk and moved in with Helen and George.

The Walsh Girls has been more highly praised than almost any first novel since Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel and Tess Slesinger’s The Unpossessed. It deserves most of the good words given it. It suffers from the same bleak self-minimization that wounds the characters in the story and the town they live in, and the country of which it is part. Just as Lydia seems doomed to regard her life as dreary even when plainly it is not, so Author Janeway ruthlessly stamps out excitement and unexpected humor, like Miss Lydia keeping order in her classroom. She also stamps out any intimation that her characters are important people whose lives, even if they do not value them themselves, are of human significance. Readers may also feel that in emphasizing the faded Main Street malice of parts of Hackettston, Mrs. Janeway is buying some of the Brazilian bonds of contemporary fiction.