Dial 70:95 Ja ’21 3950w
“He has chosen a highly impressionistic method of conveying his perceptions and observations. There are few or no connectives. Sentences and paragraphs stand alone and unfriended. Individually they are pitched in an extremely high key. The result is both nerve-racking and, in the end, without true effectiveness.”
− + |Nation 111:480 O 27 ’20 320w
“The quality of this novel seems courageous in a small way but chiefly wilful; sincere but not important. He seems to have intensity without much perception. But one thing Mr Frank does do: he brings home to us anew in this book the very valuable reminder that there are vast areas of life that our literature has not yet known how to include. In that sense this novel in places may be called a creditable experiment in material.” Stark Young
+ − New Repub 25:148 D 29 ’20 520w
“‘The dark mother’ is a lost cause, so far as the medium goes. For it is transitional, it is neither the novel, nor something distinct from the novel. Judged as a novel, it does not satisfy; and there is nothing else to judge it by. In any case, Waldo Frank is en route for something or other.” Kenneth Burke
− + N Y Evening Post p6 N 27 ’20 1350w
“Of all kinds of sophistry the most insidious is that coming from an eloquent writer who is the unconscious victim of unsound thinking. Mr Frank is perhaps unduly preoccupied with the world and the flesh, but it would take a psycho-analyst to gauge his intention in dwelling upon them. To give the author his due, it must be said that he impresses the reader rather as a man groping for ethical convictions. Mr Frank’s powers of characterization deserve high praise.”
− + N Y Times p22 N 21 ’20 800w
“Short sentences, in the manner of the late Horace Traubel, make ‘The dark mother’ rather jerky and monotonous. How is it that so many young writers do not understand that just at present books about sex have become a little tiresome?” E. L. Pearson