Word: lardners
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James Cain has a cold authority about suburban vice which could yield an invaluable gloss on Middletown or even on the works of Lardner and O'Hara. His trouble is not knowing when to stop. His money gets so cold, his sex so hot, his snobbery so snakelike and his dirty work so predictably subhuman, that their victims are scarcely more than caricatures of human fallibility. But the drugstore-library sensationalism that still overhangs Cain's work does not stop him from being one of the most readable storytellers in the U.S. He has broadened his subject matter...
This week U.S. radio script-writing took a short shuffle away from the tradition of heartthrob and supermanliness and toward the amiable vulgarity of Ring Lardner. The show is WOR-Mutual's Fight Camp, a good-natured yarn about a sturdy widow named Ma Corbett (Blanche Ring) who conditions pugs with one hand while keeping them away from her pretty daughter with the other...
...Bronx is a luxuriant weed patch on the landscape of U.S. speech, and Mr. Kober knows its every leaf and stalk. Damon Runyon thinks that Kober has "the keenest ear for human speech of any writer since Ring Lardner." In one way Kober tops Lardner, for Lardner's baseball players talked pretty much alike, whereas there are distinct differences-some obvious, some subtle-in the talk of Bella and Max as against that of Ma and Pa Gross...
...only Richard Hughes has written so well of the behavior of children. Without one line of comment, Williams makes clear "social significances" which the authors of Middletown can only bumble over. With scarcely a skid into deliberate lyricism, whole chapters become lyric. Dickens without gush, Dreiser without fat, Lardner without cynicism, might combine to approximate it. On his subtle, flexible, nonliterary monotone, Dr. Williams seems to carry, without gasp or gesture, the whole load of daily living...
...that he doesn't have his troubles building "Elmer" into something more than a story from "American Boy Magazine." Ring Lardner has offered little more than an obvious plot and some run-of-the-mill dialogue. But Joe isn't interested in laughter of the mind. His purpose, stated in a beautiful little speech after the last curtain, is to hit the audience around the heart. "Elmer The Great" may be a simple play about simple people but it is fine refreshment in a troubled world...