Judge — April 5, 1930 — page 21: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

JUDGING“ BOOKS A, Year ago we pretty nearly opened ** our appendec! stitches reading in hos i funny book, Evelyn Waugh. Waugh of a work and lay back satis- tied we'd helped introduce a brand- new humorist to a world panting for comedy. Recently, however, we've heen wearing our chin as a knec- guard, having learned that not more than three so-called booklovers had even heard of it, let alone read it. Are book critics then to be classed with othe h low forms of human- ity as md critics and press-agents ? Anyw fr. Waugh, hardly chilled to death by his reception, has churned out another, this time louder and fun- nier. And we've changed—harden- ing. The new one’s here for take or leave alone. If you don’t take so much the worse for you. For “Vile Bodies” (excuse _ it, please) is the new school of humor. It derives from the Beerbohm of “Seven Men,” the Wodehouse of al- most anything, and the Huxley of “Antic Hay”—and yet it is something beyond all these matters. It is closer to Huxley than to the rest. It is clever, yet not bitter. Huxley prob- ably would write this way were he not so consarned serious. It is ly the first ery of the post-post-war genera- tion of writers. It will be much imitated in style in’ years to come. It would be difficult and unfair to tell what it’s about. Primarily it is built for laughter, being a running, satiric comment on the younger gene tion of London: that soused, partyin, insane crew for whom morality, i: ners and sense hold no terrors. But Mr. V h is not devastating about them—he is not desperate, Freudian. He is as Olympian and sunny-minded Jer as we know, We don't share the popular preju- dice against war books. As long as they have something to that will forward thoughts of peace we'll con- tinue to shout them up till the next war cloud comes up from behind a profiteer. We enjoin you to read Paul Alverdes’ “The Whistlers’ Room,” terribly tragic g! i room; Robert Gr: All That,” a straightforward, absorb- ing autobiogra of an_ intelligent human before, during and after the war; and Liam O'Flaherty’s “Return of the Brute,” a hard but true cross- section of a trench in a moment of trouble. —Tep Suane comicbooks.com