[In the following mixed review of Come and Get It, Marsh applauds Ferber's eye for evocative detail, but contends that the novel loses its appeal and effectiveness in the closing chapters.]

To that great army of the American fiction-reading public who liked The Girls (1921), So Big (1924), Show Boat (1926), Cimarron (1930), American Beauty (1931), the short stories and the plays (with George S. Kaufman) of Edna Ferber, her new novel, Come and Get It, is recommended. It is of a piece with the rest.

Her publishers say of Edna Ferber that she is boxing the compass for America. She has written of New England, the old South, the Middle West and the Southwest, the cities and the farms, the past and the present in American life with equal virtuosity. Now she trains her sharp eyes and agile mind on the great Northwest country, particularly on the Wisconsin forests and paper mills, more especially on a wood pulp millionaire and his family.

The novel opens in 1907 with Barney Glasgow already the richest man in the State, one of the big millionaires of the country—the wood pulp king. Outside there is a panic; it is the era of Roosevelt, trust-busting, muckrakers. But the robber baron of the north woods is very comfortably and securely entrenched. Who is this Barney Glasgow? We go back to the early days of lumbering and paper-making in Wisconsin; to the days when Barney Glasgow was a boy in a lumber camp, through the years of his youth as a lumberjack, to the days of his early successes in business and investment deals, leading up to the time when he marries old Jed Hewitt's plain and disagreeable daughter and inherits the Hewitt fortune. We follow the history of the family, thereafter, from 1907, through the tremendous expansion of the war years, through the boom, the crash and the depression, into the present when, shorn of much of its power and wealth, the family seems to have, for the time being, come to a pause.

That is the general scheme and plan. Miss Ferber deplores the waste and greed and destruction resultant on the policy of the early and later timber barons. But she is not effective as a muckraker. She "emotes" over material, after she has gathered it; she is a story-telling reporter and she gets her story over to an American public which prefers sentiment to drama. But Miss Ferber can be an A1 reporter. However the experts may quibble over her data—and there is always room for quibbling—she collects her material in thoroughgoing fashion. Then she organizes it and injects her freshly gleaned technical knowledge, historical anecdotes, twice-told tales, into a piece of magazine-story fiction. All her novels start off bravely; but toward the end her own emotions seem to get the better of her and, after a consistent pattern, go off the deep end into what can only be called bathos. Thus she robs her people of that dignity and individuality with which, as an intelligent and sympathetic observer, however superficial, she has endowed them.

Just as So Big, which won the Pulitzer Prize back in 1926 and was a superior best-seller, went to pieces after the fine and moving first half, wound up with a one-armed French general and an entourage of celebrities coming down to weep over the Mother of So Big, so Come and Get It proceeds from a brave beginning to a linked series of heart throbs. Before Barney Glasgow, along with many of the other early characters, is destroyed physically he has been destroyed for us as the unusual and striking character we came to know in the first half of the novel.

But the device of blowing sky-high much of her impedimenta in the way of early characters in order to concentrate on the few she wishes to carry over from one generation to another, seems justified as a technical device in avoiding an awkward transition and keeping the story a continuously moving one through the years.

The latter part of the novel deals with the cosmopolitan womenfolk of the American millionaire hierarchy in New York, Paris, London and the various vacation grounds of the plutocracy during the era of prosperity.

In his fifties, Barney Glasgow had lost his heart and his head over the 18-year-old granddaughter of his old boss, Swan Bostrom. As a young lumberjack he had known her grandmother. He showers on the whole family—his old comrade Swan, Swan's daughter Karie, and the girl, Karie's daughter Lotta, all the advantages possible without rousing suspicion. But Lotta has the instinctive knowledge of her own unique physical loveliness. She is, with her mixture of Swedish, Portuguese and other racial strains, a rare, an extraordinary beauty. Even as a young girl she knows her worth, by instinct, and while she permits Barney, as an old friend of her grandfather, to shower gifts upon her, she is canny enough to realize that her best bet is Barney's son, Bernie Glasgow, sole heir to his father's millions and, what is more to the point, marriageable. Lotta is well done at this stage. It is not that she is shrewd, calculating or ungrateful. It is that she is emotionally as cool as a child and as simple, direct and egotistical as a child.

We are taken the rounds of high-powered plutocratic international society during the Twenties. Lotta, with her raving beauty and her millions, with her mother, Karie, who has the instinctive sense that her rôle is that of a homely, crude, mighty pioneer woman of the American Northwest, becomes the rage. She and her mother break down every barrier, Lotta's beauty and Karie's forthright, downright, honest vulgarity vying for chief attraction.

This part of the novel could easily be made into an operetta as fascinating and charming as Show Boat—given Jerome Kern's music. Indeed, it smacks of that illuminating, if theatrical, manner of catching the volatile essence of a situation which is the glory of musical romance.

Edna Ferber remains the stanch American; she both knows and loves the vast varieties of American life. Her methods and interpretations, however, suggest, rather than the realistic novelist, the social historian at one extreme and the theatre at the other.