RAIN IN THE DOORWAY

By Thorne Smith '14, Doubleday Doran, 1933.

Mr. Thorne Smith sings of the golden moments we snatch away in beauty's bloom from our ugly hours on Main Street. His lawyer-hero is snatched out of a doorway into partnership in a harem of shop girls, who tweak the noses of customers, snatch kisses from Victorian males like you and me, and snatch a few hours off duty to indulge in mixed bathing. It is all a "hilarious, mad whirl." The hero, like the author, neglects his proper business to snatch the keyhole from the Peeping Toms who crowd his pages. The profuse illustrations will serve for those who have no time to read the book: dresses caught fatally on mudguards, disconcerting collisions in bathroom doors, dawn revealing strange bedfellows. The prevailing accent is humorous rather than sensual. Even as laughter is allied to tears, so the inimitable wit of Thorne Smith induces pain,—but I must illustrate. No reviewer can do justice to the subtlety of overtone. The lawyer has been snatched out of the rain into a job as salesman in the rare book department: "Do you have the Sex Life of the Flea?" the woman asked sharply.

"No, lady," he answered disgustedly. "I don't have the sex life of a louse."

"But I must have the Sex Life of theFlea," the woman insisted.

"I hope you enjoy it," he retorted, "but I shall play no part in it. None whatsoever."

For the disillusioned reader the author offers "trenchant satire," as in the following purple patch:

"He had married her under the impress ion that she was a delicately complex creature of many charming moods and fancies. Now he found her no better than a sleeping and eating . . . cat. A cat would be an improvement, in fact. Cats did not slam doors and hurl books. Yes, taking everything into consideration, a cat would most certainly be a welcome relief."

The author maintains the level of his earlier books, where you may find hilarity snatched from life, even the reader's life, as a bishop is thrust into a nudist colony, or the gods roam Broadway, or a commuter turns, at a wave of this Merlin's wand, into a beast. It would be ungracious to pick minor faults, to insist that these novels lack the vigor of Rabelais or the gaiety of Wodehouse. Dull, unreadable, monotonous they may be, but the Truth is One, and hence monotonous. Despising the counterfeit tricks of the artist, Thorne Smith remains true to his ideal: to strip the cloak from humanity and expose its underwear.