Golden Words

Miss HARRIET TOWNSHEND (287 pp.)-Kathleen Norris--Doubleday ($3.75).

Generations of Americans have clustered about her knees to hear her stories; even when she was younger, Kathleen Norris sounded like Grandmother, recalling the gossip and the gallants of her girlhood. Between her first novel, Mother (1911), which sold an estimated 4.500,000 copies, and her latest (No. 78), so many of her books were sold that all count was lost. Novelist Norris could not even keep track of the number of her novels bought by the movies (at least 23, including My Best Girl and Wife for Sale). In her 78 novels she has written, by her estimate, about 9,000,000 words at the rate of about $1 a word. At 74, America's most expert fashioner of the wholesome love story is slowing down: Miss Harriet Townsend is her first novel in two years. The scene is old California, but it is still that familiar woman's world which is largely devoted to men. Two beauties, one Spanish, one Irish, become friends, and all goes well until a man comes between them. He is an Oxford-educated rancher, but a Don Juan rather than a don. One of the girls ropes him, of course. The other gets a consolation prize: a mere unlarned cow poke, he is, who did not even get to Cambridge. Miss Harriet Townshend is vintage Kathleen Norris--sweet, inoffensive, forgettable.

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