Word: dillwyn
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GRAY SHEEP-Dillwyn Parrish- Harper ($2). Dillwyn Parrish, brother of Anne Parrish, the Perennial Bachelor lady, last year came forward as another sharp-eyed anatomist of life's nobodies. Repugnantly dear to him is the tragicomedy of middling people-middling honest, middling happy, middling alive. He called his first novel Smith Everlasting. The Rev. Fred Rain of Gray Sheep is another victim of everlasting Smithness in body, mind and spirit-a figure at once lovable, pitiful and contemptible from the equivocal nature of Smithness, for which another name is stagnation...
...Rain is Elmer Gantry described by a neighbor whose generosity and politeness, guarded by a sense of humor, have not been assassinated by anger or malice. No bit of raucous mimicry by Sinclair Lewis surpasses Dillwyn Parrish's subtly corrosive pictures of fleshy Fred Rain painting his bathroom while trying not to marry; fouling his straight young son's mind with a circumlocution on sex in flowers; preparing stuffy sermons in his smug study. Not "Old Jud" himself, the muscular college revivalist of Elmer Gantry, is more offensive than Fay Johnson, the Y.M.C.A. hearty of this book...
...Author. Short, slim, quiet, Dillwyn Parrish lives in Claymont, Del., the young bachelor master of an old homestead, exchanging visits often with the sister whose bookishness revived his interest in life after a bad time...
...story of Kate Green and her son Joe and all their relatives and neighbors in Westlake, New England, is another story of the tragically commonplace and, its eternal power of keeping on. Sister Anne is a little cheerier than Brother Dillwyn. She lets at least one character, life-loving Evelyn, young Joe's wife, escape back to New York and Paris whence she came. She even lets her have Hope, her daughter (the small hope of Westlake), and puts all the agony on Joe's shoulders, which broaden by bearing it alone. But Kate, from...
...digs and farces and innuendoes of these young Parrishes there is no telling. No situation, nobody is safe from them, especially from Sister Anne, who talks less than Brother Dillwyn but writes more. The sugary, slap-my-wrist, mother's-boy "line" she gives her J. Hartley Harrison, scoutmaster, is one of the most innocently poisonous characterizations ever done. Some of her others are: acidulous Aunt Sarah, 99, with parrot and enema bags; dependable, blockheaded Charlotte, who marries Hoagland Driggs; the fat little heir across the street; wan, wishful Carrie, Aunt Sarah's slave; and-flashes-sultry, vivid...