[In the following review, Lazarus finds A Leaf in the Storm to be a failure compared to Lin's other works.]

In time of war the writer suffers under the same forces of dislocation as the rest of us, but on him their effect is double, for he reacts both in his own person and in the persons and world of his creation. He is not only in the war, and thus disabled, but his guns are spiked, since he is deprived of his heritage as a writer. How a writer writes is, in every age and under whatever compulsion, more than half determined by the reservoir of past writing; and in time of war the stream of the tradition in which he must work is dammed up, its current cut off by the influx of new values that for the best of human reasons demand to be expressed only in terms of their own overriding urgency. In so far as it is capable of literary form, however, the writer's material cannot be expressed in its own terms; it must take its form from past writing. Consequently the old mode of expression persists while the new insists; and both are impoverished.

“Our task here,” writes Lin Yutang, “is to trace what the war did to one woman, one leaf among the millions.” Neither the task nor the tracing, neither the end nor the means, is as simple as the thesis, for the author is under a twofold authority: the war story, which demands its own uncompromising treatment; and the love story, which is written, as it had to be, from past literary tradition. Neither succeeds. The stories are not fused by the one woman, Tanni, or by the tricks used by every novelist, which are too patent here, especially the misunderstanding between Tanni and Poya, contrived for the express purpose of moving Tanni from the love story to the war story. Nor are the elements of the plot followed through; we are told what is to happen but we do not see it happen. And although the characters are sometimes permitted to act naturally, the action is far too often merely stated, described, recapitulated. It follows that the emotion of the characters is not felt, for the emotion is not completed in suitable action, only in action obviously manipulated by the author. The arbitrarily contrasted characters of Peng and Poya are presented fully formed and undergo but scant change because of the war or their love for Tanni. Peng is better realized than Poya, who is so static that, incapable of dying, he has finally to be killed off by the author in self-defense. I feel, too, in this book [A Leaf in the Storm], as compared with Moment in Peking, the intrusion in the love story of an especially Western kind of vulgarity—the flabby notion and facile routine of “romance,” the groove in which the writers of so many best-selling novels play.

A Leaf in the Storm is a failure when it is judged by the standards Lin Yutang has himself provided in his best work, Moment in Peking. Few novelists today have Lin Yutang's feeling for a scene, his ease in filling a room with living people; none have his beautiful sense of poise, which, when he describes voices, features, mannerisms, or even Tanni perched on a chair, makes the book inhabited by a presence that seems actually to exist in space. For Dr. Lin, who does not have that much overrated talent for condensation, the major fault of the book is its brevity. If it had been at least twice as long—it has 368 pages—the story and the plot might possibly have worked themselves out. Then the part about the war would have had the scope provided by a long novel for the blending of detail. And the characters, who seem so eager to grasp every opportunity they are given to act naturally, might have found the leisure to enjoy the ease and naturalness which are the author's best qualities.

The pages about the war (1937-38) are often interesting in themselves, but except when they are an integral part of the story they are simply informative and, as such, extraneous to a novel. Information kills the characters by establishing two levels of communication which do not meet. A novel should be an uninterrupted amplification and clarification of the author's intention, and this intention is weakened or completely nullified by the intrusion of information. Even generalizations such as “the wrong man has done to man” or “war does strange things to people” have meaning in a novel only when, in the novel's living context, they are conclusions arrived at, known, and suffered through in terms of the ordered fiction of the book. Then, as in life, such statements take on a tragic meaning.

As for the war itself, the author sees the enemy committing atrocities “not possible with normal men,” killing “for the delight of it.” If the enemy is the measure of abnormality, what safeguard is there for the sanity of the enemy's enemy? It is learned nonsense to suggest that “to make the matter plain … the realms of abnormal and criminal psychology and of mass and race psychology must be coordinated.” And this affirmation of Poya's is also nonsense, more shocking even if more understandable: “But in order to have the morale to stand up under these sufferings, every Chinese must hate the Japanese. Therefore the Japanese soldiers must continue to be as brutal and beastly as they are now.”

“For even as one shut out from a garden and come away still keeps thinking of the garden …”—I remember these words from A Leaf in the Storm, for some such feeling as they convey kept turning my mind back to Moment in Peking with every succeeding page. My warm welcome to Mulan, who is reintroduced, brought home the difference between the books. In Moment in Peking the life of the characters and of the places derives largely from the conventions, the form, of an ordered society, providing frame, definition, boundaries, within which the individuality of the characters is projected. It is this formal restraint of conventions, of a continuity, of a base taken for granted, that must be present before the individual life of a character can have more than an isolated meaning. War, striking at the writer with doubled impact, deprives him of the security necessary to the consummation of his talent. It is no wonder that in most novels written in time of war the story is perfunctory and the characters are unconvincing. While a civilization is at war, neither the writer nor the people he writes of are capable of the orderly development through which completeness is achieved.