“The reader will thank us for letting him discover for himself the rare charm of this book. Passion is excluded, though there is plenty of idealism, and an abundance of hard, shrewd wit. National characteristics are exceedingly well portrayed. There is here a fineness akin to a forgotten art.”
+ Review 2:487 My 8 ’20 1250w
“Most of our readers, faced with this list [of characters] in the abstract, will be inclined to turn from the book with a ‘Lord ‘a mercy!’ or ‘Heaven save us!’ If they do they will be quite wrong, for, in spite of the soundness of the argument, the book is a light one, and full of very pleasant relief, which we must not call comic, but which has the same effect as the old stage artifice.”
+ Spec 123:616 N 8 ’19 2200w + Springf’d Republican p10 Ap 29 ’20 280w
CAINE, WILLIAM. Strangeness of Noel Carton. *$2 (3c) Putnam
20–11497
This is not exactly a story within a story but rather two stories so interwoven and fused that in the end they are not distinguishable apart. They are both written in the first person by Noel Carton and one is his journal and the other the novel he writes because his wife has said he couldn’t do it. This wife he hates for her crudity and smallness, altho he has sold himself to her for the home and comforts she gives him. In his novel he unconsciously portrays himself and his wife Josephine as his main characters, Nigel and Jocelyn. As he becomes absorbed in his plot, and as he takes more and more powerful drugs in his fight against insomnia, it is increasingly difficult for him to distinguish between the real of his life and the unreal of his fancy. The climax comes when his hallucinations give way to madness, and the tragedy of his novel is carried out in real life.
“The fastidious reader will be inclined to put this volume aside after the first few pages, but if he can persevere he may very quickly realize that the vulgarity of the author’s manner is deliberate, and very effective and moving. It is paying a great compliment to Mr Caine to say that no one who does not read this remarkably plausible tale from cover to cover could believe it.”
+ Ath p846 Je 25 ’20 180w