Word: siebels
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...TIME BEING (219 pp.)-Julia Siebel-Harcourt, Brace & World...
Kansas-born Novelist Julia Siebel seems intent on becoming the laureate of quiet lives desperately lived. In two novels about her native state, there is an occasional wheat-crop failure, but the yield of domestic unhappiness is as invariable as debt and taxes. In The Narrow Covering (TIME, July 30, 1956), careless and malevolent death bore down on ordinary prairie folk to whom Author Siebel assigned hardly a pleasant, let alone a happy, moment. For the Time Being is relatively upbeat. No one dies. Yet no one lives, either; like a quarter section of Spoon River Anthology, the human crop...
...Midwestern farmers and townsfolk as they were by a kind of rage because life was not more beautiful. Their kind of literary rebellion is as dated today as the harsh, shallow life they raged against. That is what makes The Narrow Covering, a first novel by Kansas-born Julia Siebel, as curious and archaic as grandpa's best suit accidentally encountered in a forgotten closet...
...store, she raises her nephews, she keeps house and plays bridge when she has to. But her neighbors bore her, the birth of a daughter fails to enrich her unsmiling nature, and neither good times nor bad, drought nor plenty seem to offer any real excuse for living. Author Siebel kills off her characters with adding-machine indifference. Mother goes. Then the favorite nephew dies in World War II. Finally, Ella herself methodically swallows a bottle of sleeping pills, rinses her water glass, and lies down to die in a final paragraph that is dealt like a poker hand...
Reread Willa. Author Siebel's grim little slice of life has the troubling oppressiveness of a Grant Wood painting. Her portrait has a frame of iron, and within it poor Ella and all the rest do not have a chance because Julia Siebel never meant them to have one. Hatred for the harsh side of farm life is here, and hatred for the narrowness of small-town life, but it comes out as a pathological hatred instead of a meaningful one and Ella Beecher seems not so much tragic as vegetable. The publishers compare this embittered tale with...