ON THE SHELF

MR. SCHORER'S second novel, "The Hermit Place," is a brilliant presentation of certain characters and the doom they brought upon themselves by their own falsity. They all deserved to be damned; indeed they carried their damnation with them. But the book does not belong on the shelf of modern pessimism. It is neither nihilistic nor gloomy. These people are only one set, a segregation of incorrigibles. They have worldly circumstance in their favor, but their destruction comes from within. They live and breathe--Mr. Schorer's powers of characterization are extraordinary--but luckily they are only a segment of the race. The falsity of their idol, however, has a wider symbolism.

The characters are these: Mrs. Walton, the mother of Gracia and Marge; Gracia and Tom Wilson, her husband; and Marge, who, as the book opens, is being married to John Graves, a man much older than she. Of this group, only Tom Wilson is a normal and decent person. Mrs. Walton is a grown-up baby; Marge, who has long pursued a young aviator, David Roberts, is pathetically lustful; Gracia is a self-indulgent, sentimentalist, and John Graves is a washed-out pedagogue. Also present are Kate Harris, a scientific spinster of amorous regard, and Murray Bartlett, romantically in love with Gracia, but quite incapable. And David Roberts is there.

That afternoon, after the wedding, David Roberts is killed in an aeroplane test. It transpires that nearly all these people had apotheosized him as lover or as hero. As a false god he is colossal. After his death they weave in and out of their routine of like automatons, for the carried with him to his grave all dreams of passion satisfied or triumphant youth. Then, bit by bit, information drifts in of his indecencies, his commonness, and his betrayal of them all.

The story is superlatively well-told, and, as a chronicle of the damned, written with a suppleness and accuracy uncommon in the modern novel. The propertions are right, the prevailing irony is held implicit, and no phrases are wasted in commentary. As a study of futile people--people sinister in their futility--it is memorable. Even the death of John Graves was accomplished by a few inches of muddy water from which he could easily have arisen, instead of the quicksand he so grandly imagined it to be. The book holds one's interest throughout.