Books: Sister Act

MY SISTER EILEEN—Ruth McKenney—Harcourt, Brace ($2).

Back in 1918, when Ruth McKenney was six and her sister Eileen was five, the movie matinees of Mishawaka. Ind., were a big thing in the lives of the children of the town. They lasted all afternoon, cost only a nickel, and showed a new installment of a serial every day. Since few of the audience could read, childish riots, peanut fights, screams and free-for-alls broke out when subtitles were too long. The fun lasted until the operator switched on the lights and bawled: “Shut up, you brats, or I’ll throw you all out.” Ruth and Eileen never lost their love for it. In Cleveland, they sat through Theda Bara and Wally Reid pictures, holding their hats before their eyes at the sad parts, weeping copiously. They were getting to be big girls, having their teeth straightened, when Rudolph Valentino appeared to pale all previous movie experiences.

In My Sister Eileen, 26-year-old Ruth McKenney harks back to that happy period with the air of a mellow oldster. Originally published in The New Yorker, the 14 sketches in My Sister Eileen give a cloudy picture of Eileen, a clearer view of Ruth herself, a better account of girlish misadventures during elocution lessons, bird studies in a girls’ camp, a correspondence with a French boy in a high-school class in French, the embarrassments of waiting on table in a Fred Harvey lunchroom, interviews for a college paper.

In all these, Eileen’s role is slight: she is pretty, pursued by boys and at 13 the belle of the Epworth League, the sensation of the eighth grade. Ruth, however, with her stutter, her ability to play baseball, the social ostracism that followed her brilliant performance in the Northern Ohio Debating League, was cut out for trouble. Not entirely given over to girlish recollections, My Sister Eileen is weakest when it approaches slapstick, as in accounts of Father McKenney’s washing-machine business; funniest when Author McKenney recalls the simpler sides of old Ohio life—newspaper serials, silent movies, road shows, music lessons, the tangled plots and intrigues that flourished in girls’ camps and high schools.