Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/242

 In the provinces, a change of fashion is completed slowly. And so when a midwestern novelist announces a new book, one instinctively glances over his shoulder for his Saratoga trunk; and when he takes the little thing out of a handbag, one tends to conclude that the visitor comes on no very serious errand. After I had read The Midlander, there was a perceptible interval before I thought of it as anything more than another of Mr. Tarkington's nice novels. It is neat but not dapper. Its tone is nearer nonchalance than emphasis. It hasn't a particle of western "breeze" or a single note of western stridency. It doesn't seem to present truth through the colored medium of temperament; its atmosphere is as pellucid as window-glass. It presents, in level gentlemanly voice, the following situation:

The two Oliphant boys, Harlan and Dan, sons of an old midwestern family in comfortable circumstances, are different. Harlan is bookish, close, conservative, inadventurous. Dan as a boy likes to make things with his hands; he is expansive, progressive, and subject to sanguine enthusiasms. An admirable midwestern girl, big, healthy, with little or no nonsense in her, lives in the big house next door. But the boys go to an eastern college. Dan fools around for a while in New York, and then brings home as his wife a New York girl who may briefly be described as a neurasthenic "flapper." There are some parents and a wealthy grandmother who react in various ways to the eastern wife; and