Vardis Fisher's narrative muse is like one of those racing cars that cannot go less than sixty miles an hour and are therefore useless on an ordinary highway. Merely to crank them is to create thunder; low speed for them is the speed of a hurricane; they are not to be thought of, as indeed they are never seen, save on Daytona Beach or the salt flats of Utah. There of course they may be magnificent, but it is scarcely proper to inquire whether they are real automobiles. To the extent that they cannot turn a corner and convey passengers and stop for gas they are of course preposterous; though on their native stretches they may suggest all that an automobile can be in terms of strength and speed.

Any novel by Mr. Fisher is incapable of slow motion or plain statement. He writes every sentence with all the might he possesses, for he is never calmer than his characters, all of whom are constantly excited to the point of explosion. The result is that he cannot be called a reviewer of life, or even a critic of it, since we have never been where he has been. But at the same time the experience of reading him can be very exhilarating, and can remind us that there is such a thing as pure literary power, as naked literary energy. The experience of reading his tetralogy about Vridar Hunter was bound to be more or less stupendous even if one deplored its excess of autobiography at the close. And this much slighter tale [April], in which Mr. Fisher so happily escapes from his private problems, has in its own queer way something titanic at the core.

With an almost monstrous exaggeration Mr. Fisher gives us the thoughts and feelings of a homely girl in Idaho whose only distinction, her imagination, is unappreciated by the barbarous society into which she has been born. Mr. Fisher exaggerates both the society and the girl; it becomes a circle of oversized apes and she in its center becomes a poetess eloquent beyond belief. June—or, as she renames herself, April—has the misfortune to contain within her bumpy, unattractive body not only a desire for love but a superior understanding of it; yet among the clowns of Antelope there is nobody to share this understanding with her, let alone marry her as she might like. All but one of the men are blind to what is within her, and he—poor old Sol Incham—miscalculates its intensity, supposing it to be something like his own simple, sentimental soul. As for April's mother, Mrs. Weeg, many years of reading paper-backed novels have rendered her virtually idiotic; she believes in love, but not in the realities of it which April is forced to worship on lonely walks up and down the beautiful mountain where her imagination has been nourished. The story, in so far as there is one, is of how June fiercely confronts her problem at last and blazes her way through the underbrush of indecision to a clearing where she achieves some kind of union with Sol.

The exaggeration of which I have spoken could in other hands than Mr. Fisher's have ruined this simple tale. In his hands, despite the temptation we occasionally feel to disbelieve everything and everybody, something else happens altogether. For as the personages grow in size, the space between them widens too, so that the tale takes on a certain abstract, primordial quality; we get love in the large, as one can fancy it actually to have moved the lives of the diplodocuses and brontosauruses which once towered above the earth's great trees. Doubtless we learn nothing from the spectacle, but the spectacle itself is in some gross way fine; particularly in view of the humor with which Mr. Fisher has handled it. There were moments of mad humor in his tetralogy which did not relieve the unwholesome tensions already set up, and indeed it was never quite clear that they were humor. Here it is very clear; Mr. Fisher is enjoying his vision, and the book in some mammoth way relishes the fact that it is being written. One may therefore welcome April for other reasons than that it is a good book of its kind; it is a sign that Mr. Fisher has loosened up, and consequently it is a promise of still better books to come.