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"A book that breathes conviction in every page." - Los Angeles Times
THE WASTED AMERICANS by EDGAR MAY Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
Why are millions of Americans living on relief in the middle of affluence? From personal experience as a caseworker and investigations carried out all over the U.S., Edgar May pinpoints how a faulty education system, poor housing, and an inherently inadequate welfare program have paralyzed the poor into accepting the "dole" as the only means of sustaining themselves. He shows that the rising costs of relief reflect the high cost of prejudice, and spells out what new measures are required to start these citizens on the road to genuine self-reliance.
"...zeroes in on the enemy - apathy, ignorance, fear, deprivation, prejudice, and jargon - to tell a story that Americans have buried in guilt." - Chicago Tribune
"A first-class job of research and reporting." - Book Week
"Should be required reading for those comfortable middle-class Americans who blame the poor for being poor." - Indianapolis Times
"A most timely book ... well worth pondering." - Wall Street Journal 
"No other readable book provides in one place so much basic information on how welfare departments work today." - N.Y. Times Book Review
$4.50 at all bookstores
1817 Harper & Row
32

There Was No Escape From the Gilded Cage 

THOSE HARPER WOMEN. By Stephen Birmingham. 376 pp. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company. $5.95.
By THOMAS WHEELER
WEALTH, as Henry James and Scott Fitzgerald saw it, can bring the innocent forward and the damned to dismay. It can also be a device worth far more than its furnishings; it is always dangerous to put scenery at the service of conflict, in the way that thrones, in classic literature, brought on conspiracies. The novel of the highborn caught in their surroundings could be saved by a writer like John P. Marquand, who redeemed the stencil with a satirist's view. Stephen Birmingham, who seemed a likely candidate for the Marquand mantle when he published his first novel, "Young Mr. Keefe," a few years ago, has been trapped in his latest (and most ambitious) book, by both the stencil and the scenery.
"Those Harper Women," is a

Mr. Wheeler is a freelance critic now based in New York.

Compensation UNLESS  a girl has - exceptional endowments, a man does not want to marry a plain girl. If the girl is rich, however, the money will - compensate. The blessing is that you will not be one of these poor souls who never marry. The handicap is that, no matter what else a man likes about you, the money will always be his first consideration. Once you accept that about yourself, by dear, you can be happy. - "Those Harper Women."

big bustling novel about four generations of poor little rich girls, their husbands and lovers and divorces, their houses in Paris, their estates in the West Indies, their brief triumphs and their long despairs in their efforts to rise above the gilded cages and the chromium lounges that surround them. Unfortunately, in the hands of young Mr. Birmingham, what could have become a novel of manners becomes a novel of fashion. The stuff of life, in these pages, turns into the tales a gossip columnist lives on.
The book covers a wide time-span expertly enough, centering on the estate in St. Thomas founded by the first Harper, a wife-robber and person-trader. This mainland buccaneer has tied his daughter to a life of frustrations - which she recalls in detail as she lies dying. The cycle ends with her granddaughter, cooling off from her third divorce at Granny's side. In her days on earth, Granny hopes to redeem her granddaughter from the blight that has shadowed the years between. Somehow, she means to turn the girl's energies into a new pattern. It is this struggle for self-discovery, in both women, that provides the major framework for the novel.
Mr. Birmingham knows how to bring the world of the rich into focus. He retrieves Granny from the stock ordeals of the "old society" that formed her; he retrieves the granddaughter from the slick clichés of the jet-set by touching the old woman with an original vision and the young with sympathy. At times, they are vividly seen - and nearly felt. In the end, however, like the Harpers' own misspent wealth (which can buy only dross), he expends his own talents on story-telling prods that are all too apparent, and all too futile.
"Those Harper Women" may answer a plaguing question. Why, in such prodigal squandering of material, can such books (like so many bad but stylish movies) be fleetingly good, even briefly relaxing - and so disappointing when the last page is turned? Perhaps it is because the author has kept reality at such a distance that, when it finally reaches stage center, it becomes a non-involving spectacle.
In a more modest excavation, the tortures of wealth might come alive. Here, it is at best a clutch of graphic incidents. The difficult theme of capitalism redeemed awaits a more fortunate writer, one who can show it in truly meaningful action. 

Valley City, a Place of Spiritual Darkness

WHAT TIME COLLECTS. By James T. Farrell. 421 pp. New York: Doubleday & Co. $5.95.
By HARRY T. MOORE
RARELY has American marriage taken such a beating as it does in James T. Farrell's new novel. Its setting is not the Chicago of his Studs Lonigan or Danny O'Neill books, or the New York of his Bernard Carr series, but rather an Indianapolis-like Midwestern city. The people in "What Time Collects" are not Mr. Farrell's usual Irish Catholics, but Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The era is that of bootleggers and speakeasies, with flashbacks to horse-and-buggy times. To some extent this is the Booth Tarkington milieu, yet the characters, episodes and mood of the book are a world away from Tarkington.
The main story is essentially a simple one: Anne Duncan marries Zeke Daniels, settles into a bungalow suburb with him, and after a few years divorces him, with the encouragement of his mother. Zeke, who is a rounder, has married Anne because he couldn't seduce her. The result is a loveless relationship, without tenderness, kindness or even sentimentality. Man and wife use sex for gratification - and, at times, for power. Nor have Zeke's parents, whose marriage Mr. Farrell also puts under the naturalistic microscope, done much better. Anne's mother-in-law, more indomitable than her husband or her son, had early shown her strength when, as a girl, she had broken out of a Victorian

Mr. Moore is the author of "The Novels of John Steinbeck," "The Life and Works of D. H. Lawrence," and other books.

Lesbian affair, which the author describes intricately.
It is Anne, however, self-seeking as she is, who emerges as the most interesting of the characters, if only because that very self-seeking driver her into a posture of revolt against her dull environment. Unfortunately, the story of Anne's marriage with Zeke is continually interrupted for a presentation of the earlier life of Zeke's parents and Anne's mother. These background matters are undeniably important in that they add depth to the reported experiences of the younger generation; but because Mr. Farrell has never quite learned to manage structure, he intrudes this secondary material rather clumsily, often at the wrong point in the narrative.
As he sees his Valley City, it is a place of spiritual darkness. In Dante's "Inferno," Virgil speaks of the dwellers in hell as people in pain who have lost the good of the intellect. The characters in "What Time Collects" are people in pain who have never known the good of the intellect. It is hard to blame society for their condition, since they have almost nothing in the way of natural endowment beyond the visceral. Yet the society of which they are part has little enough to offer them, as Mr. Farrell presents it. Even their religion is bleak and limiting. Beyond the temporary pleasures of sex, Zeke and his father can find a bit of happy activity only in the Ku Klux 

"A loveless relationship." Sculpture by Marisol. Courtesy Stable Gallery. Collection Madelon Maremont.

Klan. The ideal of white Protestant supremacy gives them at least a minimum of self assurance.
It is hard to determine just how far Mr. Farrell wants to go in suggesting that the characters in this book are broadly representative of their place and time. Occasionally, he seems on the edge of a Sinclair Lewis attitude, but he never chuckles, as Lewis did, over the grotesque middle-class rituals of the twenties. This story is, except for its hard, unpoetic style, closer to Sherwood Anderson in depicting the frustrated. If the diffuseness of the book prevents it from holding together as a novel, it nevertheless has a kind of unity because the force of various individual scenes intensifies the general time of wretchedness. In accomplishing this, Mr. Farrell is, within the limitations of the mood, depressingly effective.