Word: novels
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...brings to its avid listeners the innermost thoughts and self-sacrificial impulses of its heroine. Considerably less bemused at Portia's unflagging nobility is her creator; in fact, tall, tense Mona Kent, writer of Portia Faces Life, is betraying her stainless heroine for the first time. In a novel to be published next week (Mirror, Mirror on the Wall; Rinehart; $3), Scripter Kent tells the story of "a girl who wrote soap operas and tried to live her life according to the sacrificial formula of her heroine." The end result: "She destroyed the lives of her husband, lover...
Swayed by Love. Miss Kent explains her novel and its denial of the virtues she has preached for years as "a kind of protest. I kept being torn between the nice living I've made out of radio and the sense of shame I have at turning out the kind of stuff women listeners demand." Whenever she tried making Portia "more rounded," a sliding Hooperating and a cascade of angry letters sent her scurrying back to the shelter of the nearest clump of clich...
Since Portia is always on the air-five days a week, 52 weeks out of the year-Mona Kent had to lead a double life to get her novel written. For two weeks at a time she would concentrate on her radio show and get far enough ahead so that she could put in one week's work on the book. As a result: "The novel's slick, too, in places. Whenever I got to a dramatic point I found myself letting go with everything I learned in soap opera...
Author Janeway showed a mildly original talent for characterization in a first novel (The Walsh Girls, TIME, Nov. 29, 1943). Her second (Daisy Kenyan, TIME, Nov. 19, 1945) was as confused as the neurotics she wrote about. The Question of Gregory shows no particular improvement and raises the question why writers are encouraged to churn out novels whose people are as unbelievable and basically as uninteresting as poor old John Gregory...
Revolt in San Marcos offers no pat answers, closes merely by posing its problems honestly. If Author North had as much skill in creating a full gallery of credible characters as he has in drawing Carlos and his problems against the convincing background, he might have written a great novel. It is still a pretty good first...