[Feld was a Rumanian-born American critic and journalist. In the following favorable review, she praises the characterizations and plotline of Saratoga Trunk.]

Again Edna Ferber has taken a slice out of America's past and made it come alive. In Saratoga Trunk, her new novel, she has gone back to the '80's of New Orleans and Saratoga, two cities which at different poles represented the lustiness, the vitality and the romance of the period. Both scenes are admirably suited to her abilities. She has a feeling for the color and the sparkle of the robust, a relish for honesty of emotions and actions, however rooted in dishonesty; a kinship with a generation which had a deep respect for good food. Saratoga Trunk is certain to take its place beside her Show Boat which for mood and feeling it closely resembles. Not for nothing have the movies snatched up this story, written with her rare instinct for theater and her tremendous gift for investing characters with glamour.

Miss Ferber opens her story in the present when eighty-nine-year-old Clint Maroon, picturesque millionaire, with his wife, Clio Maroon, is meeting the members of the press to give them a statement about the gifts he is making to national institutions. The reporters have come to ask questions about the value of property, paintings, ships, holdings, the possessions of which the Maroons are freeing themselves. Impatiently they sweep aside the efforts of the still physically impressive octogenarian to tell them what he considers the real story they should print, the personal tale of intrigue, swindle and ruthlessness upon which his riches were made. He gives hints of his wife's oblique forebears, of a murder accusation, of his own guilt in dealing with men; but the reporters have a deadline to meet; they cannot spare the time to listen to memories which have no bearing on the front-page news they've come for.

It is the story they think unimportant and insignificant which makes the novel; the tale of Clint and Clio Maroon. They met in New Orleans, she at twenty a beautiful young woman just returned to her native city after an absence of fifteen years; he at thirty a handsome Texan who had come to the languorous Creole metropolis to try his fortune at games of chance. Clio belonged in New Orleans; she was the daughter of a Creole aristocrat, Nicolas Dulaine, and of Rita Vaudreuil, famous beauty whom he had installed in his house in Rampart Street. There Rita Dulaine, as she called herself, had shot and killed Dulaine in a lovers' quarrel. The scandal had been hushed up by his family, and Rita, accompanied by her sister, Belle Piquery, the child Clio and the two servants, Kakaracou, the colored maid, and Cupidon, her dwarf son, were shipped off to Paris. One must read the book to get the rich flavor of this fantastic group—the languishing beauty who gave all for love, the robust and lusty Aunt Belle who knew the price of favors, and the two loyal and bizarre servitors who watched over the two women and the child. So brilliantly are they portrayed that it is their consistent strangeness which gives them their quality of integrity as creatures in a demi-monde of a departed era.

With her mother's dark beauty and her aunt's practical shrewdness, Clio was determined to get out of life what each of them had missed—respectability and wealth. Clint Maroon, the handsome Texan in the white sombrero, could give her neither, she knew, but the attraction between them was too strong to deny. They became lovers with the realistic understanding that it was a temporary partnership which would end when Clio met the rich and respectable man who would become her husband.

Magnificently Miss Ferber describes the New Orleans of the early '80s, against which the two vivid characters move in an aura of increasing scandal. One gets the atmosphere of the city in her enumeration of its thrilling odors, coffee, ships, exotic fruits, old churches, which blended together became "the smell of an old and carnal city, of a worldly and fascinating city"; one becomes familiar with the romance of its conventions and customs in her description of the opera, the social castes, the markets, the early mass, the food at Hippolyte Begue.

Because of her attachment for Clint and her notoriety as the daughter of the famous places, Clio realized that New Orleans could never give her the position she craved. Fortified by money she received from the Dulaines in a ruthless blackmail scheme, she followed Clint to Saratoga, the gambling paradise of the North. Here, with her eye-opening entourage of the turbaned black maid and the uniformed dwarf, she became a sensation as Countess de Chamfret. This is straight theater on the part of Miss Ferber, not wholly convincing but admissible as part of her romantic tale. And just as she captures the feel of New Orleans down to its bones, so does she recreate the fever and flavor of the Northern city, "prim, bawdy, vulgar, sedate, flashy, substantial." This was Saratoga, and this in many ways was Clio Dulaine. It suited her with all its extravagances, not the least of which was the great wealth of Bart Van Steed, the spa's most eligible and most mother-ridden bachelor.

Readers of American history will remember the industrial ferment of the latter half of the nineteenth century, the fight for oil, for land; for railroads, for steel; the pillaging of public and private property, the swindling and brutality of the "robber barons." Miss Ferber brings enough of this into her story to explain the rise of Clint Maroon. The handsome and, at times, naïve Texan wanted no part in these activities; as he explained to Clio, he had come to Saratoga to get himself "a little honest money—cards, roulette, horses and so forth." But the fashionable United States Hotel housed financial as well as social intrigue, and before long Clint was involved in the fight between the timid Van Steed and the scheming Jay Gould over the control of the Albany & Tuscarora Railroad. The story of the battle at Binghamton over the hundred-mile road makes a bloody page in American history, and Miss Ferber uses it with excellent effect in her story. The end is clear in the beginning.

One closes Saratoga Trunk with the feeling of having lived in a rich and exciting world, peopled by fascinating and exciting characters no less real because they are eccentric and romantic. The secret of Miss Ferber's achievement is rooted in many things—her vitality and belief in the people she creates; her meticulous care with all details of background and characterization; her unfailing sense of drama. Possibly this adds up to genius. At any rate, Saratoga Trunk will be relished and remembered not alone for the love story of Clio and Clint but for Aunt Belle, for Kakaracou and Cupidon, for Mrs. Coventry Bellop, poverty stricken social leader of Saratoga, and for nostalgic evocations of a forgotten day in New Orleans and Saratoga.