CULT OF THE ORDINARY
AN'END AND A BEGINNING, by Dorothy Cowlin; Jonathan Cape, English price 12/6. HIS novel, which isn’t without charm, is realistic to the point of banality. The people are so ordinary, so little
happens to them, and they have so few ideas, that the patient skill of the author seems misspent. But her characters do come to life, a hotch-potch collection of toomers from any apartment-house, anywhere in England; and their petty circumscribed lives cry out faintly for sympathy, for a little air in the holy prison of genteel poverty. The pathetic romance, like much of the rest of the story, was fathered by H. G. Wells’s Kipps, Unfortunately, for an author without much vigour it’s a dead-end beginning. Realism demands incident as surely as mood writing demands subtlety. There isn’t enough here of
either.
A.
V.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19541029.2.22.7
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 797, 29 October 1954, Page 14
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140CULT OF THE ORDINARY New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 797, 29 October 1954, Page 14
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