Books: Best Seller

THE HISTORY OF ROME HANKS AND KINDRED MATTERS—Joseph Stanley Pennell—Scribners ($2.75).

The big guns of U.S. newspaper book reviewing greeted Rome Hanks last fort night with the most thunderous salvo that has welcomed a first novel since Gone With The Wind. It was a “superb achieve ment” to the New York Times and “a beautiful and terrible book” to the Herald Tribune; a “powerful, intense and tre mendous story” to the Chicago Sun; “extraordinary, impressive, raw, vital, brutal and alive” to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Some reviewers entered reservations (“exhibitionist antics . . . abominable and irritating preciosity, a self-conscious pre tentiousness”). But the effect of their praise, plus lavish advertisements, was immediate. Rome Hanks sold out its first edition overnight.

Buyers content with simple violence and vice got their money’s worth. But if Rome Hanks were sold with a money-back guarantee, its publishers might live to regret its boom. Overwritten, exaggerated, affected and confused, it is an incoherent patchwork of incidents stretching from Waterloo to Roosevelt II, centering in the Civil War and loosely sewn together by the narrative of a young man in search of his ancestors. (One of them is Grand father Romulus Hanks, late Captain of the 117th Iowa.) It is crowded with pas sages of adolescent naughtiness, self-conscious profanity and dreamy, implausible and interminable accounts of old Southern vices. Its battle scenes are compounded reports of decapitations, disembowelings, castrations. It is a novel of death without grief, fornication without intimacy (or even without much interest), violence without terror.

But in spite of its surface absurdities and wild overwriting, Rome Hanks is a noteworthy book. The qualities which distinguish it, and which led reviewers to praise its author’s vitality, are 1) an acute disgust with the oversimplifications and idealizations of most historical fiction, 2) a pounding, repetitious style which, in 363 pages, develops considerable force, and 3) a genuine mastery of hillbilly dialogue. Readers who note how well Author Pennell pictures his plain soldiers, and how successful he is when he is not melodramatic, may wonder why he felt compelled to overload his book with lurid details, hope he will go easier next time.

The Author. Joseph Stanley Pennell was born in Junction City, Kansas, refuses to give his age “for Army reasons.” He went to the University of Kansas, spent three years at Oxford, worked variously as newspaperman and radio announcer. He is now a second lieutenant in an antiaircraft battery stationed near San Francisco.