The Sauk Centre herald. (Sauk Centre, Stearns County, Minn.) 1886-current, 1940-01-04
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CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY
BY Somerset Vaughan
By Bernice FinneS0n

w. somerset Vaughan has here
written a novel that should appeal
to every reader. Discounting the
profound overtones of the book, the
author has been completely absorb
ed in telling the story, and telling it
as he alone could. There is a story
within-a-story in the sin and atone
ment of Robert Berger, petty thief
and convicted murderer, a story
which the reader learns from Ly-
dia, the prostitute, and Simon, the
fanatical revolutionary; a story
which embraces French middle
class responsibility, the underworld
and the police, the criminal courts
and which finally ends on Devils
Island.
Of greater Importance is the
story of the young Englishman,
Charley Mason. to whom the world
of Lydia and Simon is new one
in which he feels inadequate and
strangely afraid, a world, disuuiet-
ing to all his thoughts about the
order of things. making him doubt
that everything he stands for is as
fine as he believed it was. 1t is
such a tangled skein of thought
and incident that Somerset Maug-
ham has woven into an intricate
pattern, making his characters
come to vivid life-Charley, with
the warm scent of youth about him;
Lydia with her Russian instability,
unforgettable in the depth of her
passion; and Simon, perhaps, the
most vivid of all with the sense of
repressed power in his gaunt frame
and his idealism mixed with cyni-
cism.
Christmas Holiday is a timely
and penetrating social study, i'm
bued with the same force and vi
tality that was revealed in "Of HUI
man Bondage" But it's searching
energy is the result of a more dis
ciplined mind, sure of its ground,
surveying the world and comment
ing upon it with knowledge reaped
from experience.
THREE MILES SQUARE
BY Corey
Zone Of the best novels of agri-
cultural America that anyone has
produced in our generation" writes
Lewis Milford of Paul Corey's
Three Miles Square," 1t is one
of the best because Mr.. Corey has
avoided both the superheated fic-
tons of the romancers and tumble
buggery of the hard-boiled school,
and written a novel about Ameri-
can people as they are really. In
the three miles square of an Iowa
farm community in the years just
before the World War, he has Great
ed a family whose aspirations,
whose triumphs and defeats are as
American as the Iowa countryside.
Each member Of the Mantz fam
lily aspires to some part Of what
has come to be known as the Amer
lean dream. The widow Mantz re-
fuses to let the death of her hus-
hand drive her from the land they
have cultivated and made their
own. She turns down a chance to
marry again and incurs the dis
like of many of her neighbors in
her determination to stick to her
1arm ana PROVIDE ner TOUR cnlloren
with the educations she has plan
ned for them.
Her oldest son, Andrew, takes
over the mans work of farming
while still a boy, in his effort to
help her and his desire to realize
his fathers ambition by becoming
an architect. Wolmar Mantz, whose
passion for machinery foreshadows
the mechanization of farm life,
storms at the narrowness of the
rural horizon and yearns for the
outside world of cities and factor
les. Verney Mantz rebels from the
strict moral code of her family and
community and escapes by elope-
ment to the freedom of a newer
America.