The Birmingham age-herald., 1921-07-12
Alice A dams An0ther Main Street

| TIT just happened that Sinclair Lewis beat him to 1t; mean the
 S title of the book, for if Booth Tark- ington's Alice Adams" Doubleday Page and Company, publishers, Gar
 den City, New York) isn't as typical
 1y Main Street" as Sinclair Lewis
 book of that name, then my stage"
 name is not Dolly Dalrymple"
 I fancy that fully as many people
 will nominate Alice Adams' as
 typical small town chronicle"-pic-
 ~phaseH-as Main Street" is
 typical of the country village for
 with the gossip and the littleness and
 narrowness and sordidness of the small town where Main Street" car
 ries on it's shoulders the woes and the joys, the sorrows and the hap
 pness of it's inhabitants, Alice Adams" abounds
 Sinclair Lewis novel is the King Charles head of current literary con versation and has been ever since it's publication, but now it will have to share honors with MT. Tarkington's latest brain child" Alice Adams" completing the Gtrilogy with "The Turmoil' and The Magnificent Am persons" which was awarded the Pulitzer prize as the best American novel of 1918.
 Perhaps the finest portrait in the new story is Alice Adams" herself, although her mother is an admirably drawn type with her passionate de- sire to give her daughter all that oth- CT girls had, which did so much to make the Adams family an unhappy one
 The scene is laid at the present time In one of those small Middle Western cities which were small towns only yesterday. As the small town progresses cityward, 1t is in evitable that there should be some who drop behind unable for one req son or another to keep up with the procession. Among those left behind in the advance of this particular city were the Adamses, of whom MT Tarltington tells. Had Alice Adams been born after the town had gone through its transition period she, whose father was a clerk in the em ploy of the big wholesale drug house of J. A. Lamb and company, would scarcely have been a companion of such girls as Mildred Palmer and Henrietta Lamb; in the small town they were schoolmates.
 The story is developed in 8 very leisurely way. until the rain of mis- fortune begins to fall heavily on the Adams family. The worst is avoided. | They are not, as MT. Adams himself l puts it pushed spang against the wall" they manage somehow to kind of gquirm out of being right spang against the wall" but they do rot squirm very far.
 The story of the Adamses is | hard luck't story from the beginning; | nothing more pathetic has ever been | pictured than poor little Aliee Adams | at the Palmer's dance and her broth CT, Walter, a perfectly impossible | bully" who shoots craps" with the negro chauffeurs and valets and | makes himself obnoxious to his sis ter and all concerned; the one thing | that he could do was to "dance;" and | dance he did when once he was in duced to leave his "crap shooting" and enjoy The Light Bombastic Toe as our friend Octavus Roy Cohen would put 1t.
 The girl herself, Alice Adams, Is a queer mixture of attractiveness and i utter stiffness, and while many un- toward circumstances develop which | against her, she alone Is the cause of spelling the one thing that meant more than any other in | life to her, namely: the loss of the man she loved-Arthur Russell-who, after all, wasn't much of 8 loss, be- cause he was just the most colorless, | insane, unstable leading man. that | you could possibly imagine--per- haps the one Idefect' in the story.
 Alice Adams" is. of course, beau tifully written like everything that | Booth Tarkington does, and while it does not purport to be picture of | American life, it is decidedly a ''phase'--a phase which illustrates a kind and set of conditions peculiarly |