Scott. (Duckworth, 73, 6d. net.)
It was bound to come, and it is fitting it should come from America,—this mixture of the realistic with the expressionist form of novel. If Dorothy Richardson re wrote the} Rougon-Macquart series, one of the volumes would be very like 'The Narrow House.' Miss Scott, it is true, follows Huysmans rather than Zola and James Joyce rather than Miss Richardson, but the general effect of this vivid account of drab people is as if the fierce vision of Zola had been added to the indiscriminate descriptive patience of Miss Richardson. We start off with the pure naturalist method. Mrs.
she gets to the butcher's: Farley is going out shopping—and Her vague, rather squinting eyes travelled undecidedly over the big pieces of meat: the shoulders, the forelegs, the haunches, of different shades of red/ streaked with tallow or suet, that swung on hooks in the shadow against the grey white tiling of the walls. The fowls' dangled in @ row a little to the fore of j the meat. The feet of the hens were a sickly bluish-yellow, and the toes, cramped together yet flaccid, still snggested the fatigue which follows agony.
Instead of going on like this, and describing everything that everybody does, Miss Scott deserts her realism quite soon, and slips into the later method. Here is Alice Farley wondering what she will do, when the man she types for and is! in love with leaves for Europe:—
Still she stared at herself. Homely woman, It seemed to her that her veins erept like snakes along her arms. Life stealing upon one through the veins. Stealthy life running red and silent in! its bitterness through the body. Where} to go to? Horace Ridge. Ho has any; woman he wants. Famous man. Me, We have dwelt for sone time on tha method of "The Narrow House," for it is that which makes it a remarkable novel, and which has, we suppose, made it conspicuous in America. Certainly it has other claims on our attention. Its pro tagonists—Laurence Farley and his wifc—aro full of uneasiness at each i other, full of distress and possible} hatred. "They live with his parents, between whom there is the shadow of another woman. Winnie Farley; hes quarrelled with her own people} for Laurence's sake, and the story
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.