Word: rains
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...dock or at the flying field. They wave goodbye, and, when the absent one returns, he finds them once more at the field, dock, or station, pre-.pared to clasp his hand. All four are sons of the King and Emperor George V; and neither storm nor snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these brothers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds...
...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...
...Story, told episodically, is perhaps more woeful than necessary. John Rain, the son, after a gassing in France, goes away with the married daughter of his father's one scarlet woman, Tannis. On their westbound train it is revealed that John will probably die soon of tuberculosis. Rain Sr., discovers the flatulence of his faith, but, lacking courage to start afresh, keeps his job and remains, like his congregation, sheepish and grey of soul...
...constitutionally impossible for a Parrish to be really lugubrious. Innumerable small pranks and whimsies set off the pall of Gray Sheep, softening the glare of its irony, warming it with humanity. The morning of Helen (Mrs.) Rain's funeral, the eaves sparrows quarrel as usual. (She would have liked that.) At John Rain's embarkation, the tugs whisper fuchsia, fuchsia, fuchsia; then cough cocoa, cocoa, cocoa as they push the ship to midstream. During a prayer at sewing circle, Helen Rain peeps covertly at the Women's varying technique-pinching bridge of nose; clasping stomach; kneeling thoroughly...