Life — October 5, 1916 — page 28: what you’re looking at

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

LD Irish nurses (when there still were such comfortable creatures) used to tell greedy small boys who helped themselves over-plentifully that“ their eyes were bigger than their stomach Alice Brown's “The Prisoner" (Macmillan, $1.00), is an engaging piece of fiction that suffers from this psycho- logical malformation. It helps itself to a number of difficult problems and con- fusing contemporary questions in Amer- ican life and, after taking a bite or two out of each, decides that a rather un- usual and charming love story is all that it is capable of dealing with. Its scene is a New England town recently invaded by — manufac:uring and a foreign population. Its chief character is a son of one of the old families who has served a term in prison for embezzlement and comes out with a new outlook and a formulated idealism. Its characters form a varied and enter- taining coterie, And while it fails, through “ renigging,” to achieve even the semblance of a unified “criticism of life,” the majority of its readers will be likely to accept its delicate scent of orange blossoms as a satisfactory sub stitute. novel, D2 LISLE, the author of a story called “The Impossible Mrs. Bel- (Stokes, $1.30), has another way of dealing fictionally with a “ problem.” lew" to put tabasco on its tail and snoring all the facts His novel deals lis rule then solve it by that stand in the way. THINGS THAT NEVER WERE Demosthenes: were, woy! RUN AND CET ME FIVE CENTS’ WORTIL OF MAKRLES. 1 WANT TO GAKGLE MY THROAT. WILL HE MAKE IT? with an old English clergyman engaged in studying the life of Monte Carlo; with his celebrated novelist son, who is a feministic idealist; with an angel- hearted semi-demi-mondaine who has “disappeared” from English society; and with the marriage that was finally consummated between the latter two. Mr. Lisle may be merely a mad icono-, clast in a china shop, but his smashing of the spice jar doesn't look accidental. STREET GIRL” (Houghton, Mifflin, $1.35), by Frederick Orrin Bartlett, tackles no more intricate problem than the ancient one of which girl the hero shall marry, slightly complicated with the question of how a rich man’s son, unexpectedly thrown on his own resources, shall live on what he earns, There is an iron- clad will drawn by a dead father; a ten- thousand-a-year fiancée ; a job in a bank- HE WALL ing office, and a twelve-dollar-a-week stenographer. The realism doesn't go very deep, but it is a happy-hearted yarn. E V. LUCAS, retriever of lost literary treasure and contriver of com- Panionable fiction based on the hobnob- bings and chit-chat of bibliophiles, has just published a volume called “The Housefrau Rampant” (Doran, $1.30), in which he has collected the better por- tions of a forty-year-old German best- seller series known originally as “The Bucholz Family.” Frau Bucholz, a sup- posed middle-class Berlin woman of the 1880 period, writing to the papers about the doings of her family and fri was the invention of Julius Stinde, a Hamburg chemist and journalist, who settled in Berlin in 1876; and eventually these letters ran to six published volumes . and had a huge popular success. The (Continued on page 595)