It is strange, but desperately appropriate in these bitter days, to open a novel upon no heroine, no hero, and no peculiar personal problem. To find rather upon the beginning pages the sweep of continental movement, peoples—not people—on the march—a march not made voluntarily towards some desired goal but forced on before brutality, disaster, and extinction. ["The Trespassers"] starts clearly with the broader theme. The story, intense, embattled, and sharply individualized, is swept forward on the implacable wave of the present….

[Vera Marriner] is lovely to look at, smart, and finished with gloss of the cover girl but with personality and character to take the curse off that; she is shrewd and firm in business but generous, extravagant, and altruistic outside it. She illogically demands a logical righting of wrongs in a world given over to irrationality.

And Jasper Crown! Here is a character destined for discussion, dissension, and disbelief. No sooner will A contend that a man of such vehemence, contradiction, power, and weakness could never actually exist, than B will retort that he knows Jasper Crown in real life,—he is so-and-so. Two or three men in public life are sure to be taken as the prototypes of this radio tycoon who succeeds in bringing the arc of the world within his influence in a vain effort to forget that whatever else he can do the simple, natural desire for a son, for a continuance of himself in this tangible form cannot be realized.

This portrait of a present-day, up-to-the-very minute, business man, is one of the most interesting aspects of the novel. Compare him with Dreiser's Titan, with Lewis's Babbitt. How much of the differences are accounted for by Mrs. Hobson's dexterous psychoanalyzing? How much by the woman's point of view? And how much by the strange commodity which Jasper handles (opinion and propaganda)? The driving power which carries him so precariously far derives from his neurotic urge to compensate for his sterility….

[Mrs. Hobson] has not been able to merge her two themes entirely smoothly. The story of the individuals and the saga of the migrant exiles,—the two do not quite meet in the end. But the experiment is interesting in itself and gratifying in bringing to the novel a breadth and depth so often lacking in entertain-ment fiction. And "The Trespassers" is entertaining. One criticism might be that it is occasionally a little too facile in its event-packed unfolding, its slick dialogue, its smart magazine type of detail. But if readers, like flies, are more addicted to honey than vinegar then Laura Hobson is justified in her use of enticement, for hers is a novel that deserves readers. It has something to say and says it with both sincerity and vigor.