SERIOUSER AND SERIOUSER
THE LAUGHING MATTER, by William Saroyan; Faber and Faber, English price 12/6. THE SCATTERED SEED, by Stuart Engstrand; Jonathan Cape, English price 12/6. THE OUTSIDER, by Richard Wright; Angus and Robertson, Australian price 17/6. THE VENETIAN BRIDE, by Magdalen King-Hall; Peter Davies, English price 12/6. "\) HEN you love everything, and you're sad, it makes you funny doesn’t it?" Saroyan goes to the trouble of subtitling his study of the emotional | vicissitudes of the pure-in-heart "a | serious story," and it is damn serious. A small matter of adultery retailed in his peculiar simple-Simon baby-talk | which the intrusion of several children _ scarcely condones, is indeed the series 'of graduated pills subtly suggested by | the circles on the dust jacket. By flashes _Saroyan is a great writer, but ‘not great enough to carry off the weight of so | much boredom. The Scattered Seed is all about a 'near-disreputable character using the | opportunities of tree-surgery in a Southern state to hop in through _bedroom windows. He is played for a sucker by his landlady’s insignificant daughter, whose feminine ruthlessness is well conceived. This is a crude story about wholly uninteresting people, but it is less tedious than Saroyan. Richard Wright's The Outsider is more serious than Saroyan, and it is an-
otker story of the essential innocence of heart of a put-upon hero, this time after only four murders. This distinguished. Negro writer could hardly fail to say something worth while about whitecoloured relations. (It is interesting that Australia’s well-developed racial consciousness does not extend to literature.) But the grotesque bloodshed and the need to expose the nastiness of the Communist Party (Wright is a famous seceder) seriously diminish its merit. The last (and only non-American) novel is an old-time romance about an impoverished 18th Century Irish squire bringing home a treasure greater than he realises, the Venetian bride of the title. This is comfortable reading for the long winter evenings, wholly unserious.
David
Hall
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 780, 2 July 1954, Page 14
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324SERIOUSER AND SERIOUSER New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 780, 2 July 1954, Page 14
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