Books: Slesinger Shorts

TIME: THE PRESENT—Tess Slesinger —Simon & Schuster ($2.50).

When Tess Slesinger’s first novel, The Unpossessed, appeared last year (TIME, May 14, 1934), critics gave it three rousing cheers. But few thought it Dostoevskian, none noticed that its title was a salute to the Russian master. Critical consensus was that Author Slesinger was a wit, which did not mean that her story was altogether funny. Last week her second book, a collection of short stories, not only deepened but broadened the impression her first one made. In Time: The Present Author Slesinger shows herself the somewhat proud possessor of what professors call “creative imagination.” She has already been favorably compared with Dorothy Parker. Some of these stories may remind her readers of the late Katherine Mansfield.

No plot-walloper, Author Slesinger usually goes at the gist of the matter. Some of her stories—like the one in which a blue-stocking old maid, vacationing at a dude ranch, finds the secret of happiness and horseback-riding by letting a cowboy seduce her—seem a little too slick to be true, but most of them have an authentic ring.

¶ An Edna-Ferberish servant-girl is torn between her love for her fiancé and the flattering dependence of her Jewish “family.”

¶ A bride, still going through the first stages of marriage to a stranger, becomes despairingly aware of the irrepressible conflict between her mother and her husband, and her own divided loyalty.

¶ Spring comes to a girls’ boarding school—with what ripening, unsettling, nostalgic effects Author Slesinger ably tells.