Modern Tragedy

THE EXECUTIONER WAITS--Josephine Herbst--Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

Speculators on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel for 1934, already betting heavily on Ruth Suckow's The Folks (TIME, Oct. 1), saw another feminine candidate loom on the horizon last week. Josephine Herbst's The Executioner Waits has little to do with the original conditions of the Pulitzer bequest ("wholesome atmosphere" and "highest standard of American manners and manhood"), but it conforms to the present standard: it is one of the best U. S. novels of 1934.

Sequel to Pity Is Not Enough (TIME, May 29, 1933), The Executioner Waits carries nearer to completion Author Herbst's big portrait of the U. S. from post-Civil War times to the present, takes the Trexler family fortunes from 1918 to 1929. By now the Trexlers are far dispersed from their Pennsylvania homestead: to California, Iowa, New Jersey, Washington. Only one of them has gone up in the world, and for him, as for his capitalist brothers, Author Herbst implies, "the executioner waits." Of the Trexler descendants who are economically on the down grade, most do what they can to keep from slipping farther, think of little else besides; but a few are so close to the ground that their ears hear a prophetic rumbling. A novel without a hero. The Executioner Waits is a modern tragedy in the most present sense: its changing choruses are spoken by and for plain people, in terms as actual as last week's events. But Author Herbst is no journalistic realist, no pamphleteer of Communism. Her concern for her characters is never political or moral: she never justifies or reviles them except through their own mouths and for their own private ends. Her objectivity results in a total effect almost alarmingly potent. Though her method eschews purple passages (the description of old Anne Wendel's death is a masterly example of her matter-of-fact style) it gathers a sombre power that rhetoric rarely attains. The Executioner Waits is neither easy nor inspiriting reading, but few readers who persist to the end will soon forget it.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.