"Five and Ten"

Radio Record, Volume III, Issue 39, 11 April 1930, Page 28

"Five and Ten"

QNE of the new books I have read lately is "Five and Ten," by Fanny Hirst. It is a tale of an ultra-fashion-able, "self-made" American familyfather, mother, son and daughter liying together and yet utterly apart. Although rolling in wealth, which the father has acquired by his chain of "five and ten-dollar" stores, each member is miserable in his or her own separate life. The mother is ambitious and rises as their wealth increases, and is contemptuous of the father beciuse he is too little to rise with her. The son commits suicide because he finds life too hard, and the mother and daughter both have rather discreditable love affairs just to pass the time, it would seem. It keeps one in a turmoil from start to finish, and everyone seems in a continual whirl of excitement or emotion. One is used to American slang nowadays, but it is rather startling to have the heroine tell a would-be lover to "go plump to hell!" In the end, the father, the sanest of them all, deliberately leaves his daughter to struggle with "poverty" on several hundred pounds a year! Altogether the book makes one feel that if this is fashionable American life, it is good to be a New Zealander, amid sane, calm surroundings, with just enough to make ends meet. _ Curiously enough, the next book I happened to read wes a very old-fash-ioned one by Jane Austen, "Northanger Abbey." This was a_ soul-satisfying feast; the satire, the delicate humour, the whole style of the book gives pleasure, quite apart from the story. The heroine, no doubt, would be considered too meek and mild nowadays, but the ehief charm of tha hant Woe tn tha

telling

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