IT'S A FREE COUNTRY

by Ben Ames Williams '10 Houghton Mifflin Company, 1945-130 pages, $1.75.

Ben Ames Williams has written in his newest novel, relatively short, a bitter attack on the effect of the New Deal on American character. His is the voice of an individual worried, and rightly so, about the state of the nation during the last thirty years. He hates its smugness, its cocksureness, its recklessness with its resources, and he realizes the dangers to Americans inherent in the current trend toward a "planned" society.

Without a sense of individual responsibility many will travel the same sordid and tragic path his characters travel.

At the same time the author shows the corrosive effect of marriage on a fine and promising young girl, Lena Trump, whose husband is a well-meaning, but ineffectual, young American named Eddie May.

Many of his scenes are excellent and ring true but somehow the tragedy seems synthetic as his thesis, deeply felt, perverts his tale. He is no longer the impartial novelist writing with a detached view but a crusader who lias read The Road to Serfdom.