The Birmingham age-herald., 1922-10-15

manioc and the days doutine The other wives come out and proceed to their toilet. Tt was an unaffected business. Man and woman were made for one another. Since they cannot be ignorant of their differ ences why be ashamed2 Modesty is just another of the hypocrisies of the whites"
 Batouala issues a general invita- ton, by means of the wonderful tom- tom signal, to all the tribes to gather for festival, for the annual cere- mony of circumcision of the ado- lescent youths. After that he goes for a walk and the young Bissi- bingui. the handsomest, strongest youngster of the tribe, appears. He Is the favorite of all the women. He had been party to breaches between many a couple" There is an outline of the usual intrigue. differing little from the civilized triangle except in It's naivete and, it must be added, its multiplicity.
 Later we get magnificent de- scription of the festival and dance; masterpiece of restrained. careful writing worthy of Flaubert
 The author calls "Batouala" series of etehings. It would be dif- ficult to find words to describe It better.
 There is no question but that in Rene Maran the negro race has at last writer and poet of a high order. His book is unqualifiedly the greatest intellectual of artistic achievement of his race thus far.
 "Certain People of Importance"
 An American family, with all it's joys and troubles. petty and great is in the foreground of Kathleen Norris's new novel, Certain People of Importance" Doubleday Page and Company, Publishers, Garden City, New York. There is nothing unusual in the Crabtree and Brewer families, but in this intensely human narrative of wholly normal people, the author of Mother" has achieved upon a greater scale the promise of that Eomely story of simple. small-town life.
 In vicky Brewer. lovely. handi- capped by the prunes and prims of the decorous Eighties" In Aunt Fanny, May, stephen, and the ubiqui- tous "Pa," Mrs. Norris adds to the riches of American literature a gal lery of living portraits, delicately i etched with infinite humor and pa thos, and destined to find friends wherever books are read. There are many characters in the story, some prominent, some subordinate. but all playing their proportionate parts truly and naturally, and all needed In the final and powerful scenes.
 "The Old Women in the Shoe" would be more puzzled than ever If she had to worry over the countless children of the Crabtrees and the Brewers and others in "Certain Peo- pie of Importance" for they are as numberless as the sands of the sea- shore-an "endless chin" as 1t were.
 Mrs. Norris with her usual skill and technique has handled the sub ject of her novel with the splendid artistry for which she is famed as a story teller.
 Westward the tide of Crabtrees has taken its way long before our story begins There has been start from New England, a halt in Illinois, 0 further progress to St. Joe, finally a drift to California with the early voyagers of '4e. It Is in and about San Francisco that we follow through most of the fortunes and misfortunes chronicled by Mrs. Norris.
 There is no melodrama in Certain People of Importance" No Crabtree, or Brewer. or any cousin or aunt or uncle of the family. is lurid of brill- iant or extraordinary in any way. None of them achieves a situation calling for the spotlight None of them is of importance. really outside the family view. Hardworking in the early generation. they develop a streak of snobbishness in the middle ages, but reveal a fair average of promise in the houses existent as the nineteenth century draws to It's close. In way they are typical. these Crabtrees. Brewers, and so forth Reasonably they might be expected to make a dull book. But Mrs Norris's story of them is never dull; it keeps us breathing, page in and page out, an air of warm human interest; 1t gives us moments of acute provoca- tion over this or that stupidity or oyer-complacene of a Miss Fanny Crabtree or Mds, May Brewer. And no story is without a certain high merit which can humanly provoke the innocent bystanding reader "This Freedomv
 | When A. s. M. Hutchinson wrote | "If Winter Comes," he wrote one of the best and most beautifully round | ed novels that the literary world has had from any pen for the past many years.
 Naturally his new book, This Freedom" Gittle. Brown x Co.,, pub 1 fishers, Boston,, which we are told | has been two years or more in the her class had kissed her and had the impudence to tell her that he was
 "crazy" about her. And yet, she