Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/210

 If Mr. Lewis could "abandon his mind" for a season to landscape and the joy of our American seas and mountains, he could give us our most exhilarating tale of country life. He has the eye and the zest. But as yet he is so jealous for his purely human interest that he is capable of cramming all California into a parenthesis.

There is good writing, there are humor and invention, there are various milieus effectively rendered in Mr. Lewis's first two novels; but in his third, The Job, presented in 1917, there are three or four admirable pieces of characterization and a sobriety and firmness of composition which entitle this book to a place next to Main Street and Babbitt. As he swooped to meet the airmen in 1915, so he swoops, in 1917, to meet the new woman making a career in business. Una Golden of Panama, Pennsylvania, graduate of a business college, who becomes a stenographer in New York, works into suburban real estate, and then into the assistant-managership of a line of hotels, is, you may say, a typical heroine of the "success" magazines. Agreed: in a sense, so she is, just as Arnold Bennett's Clayhanger is their hero. The editors of the "success" magazines guiltily share with novelists like Mr. Bennett and Mr. Lewis a sense for recognizing the significant types of our changing civilization. Una Golden differs, however, from the smart short-story writer's girl-with-the-powder-puff as, to take a familiar illustration, Lear's daughters differ from their sketches in Holinshed. She has been seriously and minutely