Monday, Jan. 26, 1948
On the Soft Side
THE CIRCUS IN THE ATTIC--Roberf Penn Warren--Harcourt, Brace ($3).
A year and a half ago, when Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize novel All the King's Men appeared, critics acclaimed the pace and excellence of its prose and drama, compared Author Warren to William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe. Now, Author Warren has followed up his novel with selections from his shorter fiction, including two novelettes and twelve short stories. They were written during the last 17 years, and readers who expect them to be an advance on their distinguished predecessor will find, instead, that they are the earlier miss-hits of a still immature talent. More surprising--and more disappointing --is the fact that the long title story, the only one which was written after All the King's Men, is no better than the others.
Each story has a rural or small-town setting and is marked by a notebook quality of careful, detailed observation. But with the exception of the novelette Prime Leaf--in which Warren dramatically illustrates the varying extremes of behavior shown by tobacco-growers when they are driven into a corner by ruthless buyers--there is not one story that rises from notebook level to finished fiction. The tension that All the King's Men sometimes achieved is replaced by anemic slowness, the prose is slack, the approach is that of an essayist looking back with spiritless nostalgia. Elderly Southern gentlemen drift interminably through pages of reminiscences ; elderly Southern ladies dawdle through small-town streets or expire in their beds, victims of an unfortunate past or a present predicament that is never made interesting to the reader; sharecroppers, country doctors, professors and pubescent boys reach desultory conclusions about the world as a result of experiences that are more dull than grievous. Mixed in with these faint impressions of life's problems are Author Warren's own philosophical reflections--hazy musings which prolong the stories, and make them even thinner.
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