Books: Budget Book

IF I HAVE FOUR APPLES — Josephine

Lawrence—Stokes ($2.50).

A novel can be made to tell almost anything, from the subconscious thoughts of a sleeping postman (James Joyce’s Work in Progress) to how to mind the baby (Viña Delmar’s Bad Girl). Josephine Lawrence’s novels tell how the wolf can sneak up to a middle-class door, gobble up plain everyday householders before they know it. Years Are So Long (TIME, July 9, 1934) showed that there is often no home for the aged, even if they have done more with their youth than gather rosebuds. If I Have Four Apples neatly demonstrates how a refusal to face the facts of arithmetic can play hob with human lives.

Even Mr. Micawber knew that a balanced budget spells content, an unbalanced one misery; but Mr. Micawber never kept a budget. Neither did the Hoe family. Mr. Hoe thought there was something nobly American in owning your own home, even if you had two mortgages on it and could not pay the back taxes. Mrs. Hoe thought the niggardly pay she earned in a department store gave her the right to buy (on the installment plan) all sorts of luxury-conveniences. Their children thought that somehow there ought to be money enough to pay for their chosen careers: Dallas wanted to be a lawyer, Sythia a famed dancer, Darthula a rich man’s wife. None of them would face the fact that they were living hopelessly beyond their income.

When Mrs. Hoe took the family troubles to a sympathetic newspaperwoman, whose job it was to put the bee of budget-keeping in her readers’ bonnets, she got good advice free, paid by not taking it. Then unsympathetic reality began to crack down. Dallas flunked out of high school, wasted a lot of time trying to win a $10,000-prize competition, settled unwillingly to a job as chauffeur to his best girl’s father. Sythia’s grandmother sacrificed part of her funeral money to divert the “career” into a more appropriate job in a beauty parlor. Darthula’s nagging drove her beau from a good pedestrian job to a short-lived “position”; when that sank under him and he turned milkman for lack of something better, she broke the engagement. Mrs. Hoe’s job grew more precarious; Mr. Hoe’s desperate figuring on the backs of old envelopes got him nowhere as usual. When Author Lawrence tots up her human sum she finds a sadder but not altogether wiser family, circumstantially forced to admit that two plus two equals four, not eight.

The Author did not have to look further than her desk for her material. A conscientious, self-effacing newspaperwoman, she is Household Editor of the Newark Sunday Call, has been in the same job ever since she finished school, 20 years ago. Besides the two novels mentioned, she has written many a pseudonymous children’s story, another novel, Head of the Family. If I Have Four Apples is the January choice (with The Next Hundred Years) of the Book-of-the-Month Club.