Books: Good Companions, U. S.

THE PUMPKIN COACH—Louis Paul— Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

Author Louis Paul feels filial to the U. S., but instead of a mammy song he has written a novel which amply vents his feelings: “The country is fecund, heartwarming, uncritical—like a mother. Sordid things there are always there; it is necessary to look about a bit for beauty.” Author Paul has looked & looked, seems not quite sure what his view adds up to. He modestly dedicates The Pumpkin Coach to Critic Burton Rascoe, who once avowed: “I am so constituted that I had rather read bad stuff than nothing.” But Author Paul does not do himself justice : his book, in spots, is even truer than it is beautiful. Readers who liked John Boynton Priestley’s The Good Companions will find the same sort of indiscriminating gusto in The Pumpkin Coach.

Uan Koé might as well have come from Mars as from his native Samoa. Like any Martian visitor he landed in San Francisco, intelligent, stiltedly educated, highly moral. But he had little money and he did not know the customs of the country. He was having a fine time, however, and thought everyone was as nice as could be, until one fine day a strapping girl persuaded him to go swimming with nothing on. A policeman ran him in, the girl’s brother got a gang together and beat him up. Disillusion dawning, Uan went away from there. On a bus to Salt Lake City a stranger gypped him out of his remaining cash. Undaunted, Uan turned hobo. In adversity he discovered a few good companions : a fellow-hobo, a beautiful girl who gave him a horror of the second-rate, turned him from an art student to a hospital orderly. Gradually Uan became Americanized; his name slipped from Uan Koé to John Coe. When last seen he was doing well in the prize ring, with the beautiful girl not far in the offing.