Word: suckow
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...JOHN WOOD CASE (314 pp.)-Ruth Suckow- Viking...
...anyone born after World War I, Ruth Suckow's new novel may seem no more contemporary than an old-fashioned Sunday sermon, no closer to modern literature than Horatio Alger. It may be hard to believe that she was once praised as a realist, and that so joyous a literary scalper as Henry Louis Mencken cheered her on and gave her houseroom in his American Mercury. The fact is, Author Suckow has not changed at all, but life has. The Iowa that was her childhood home is still the source of her fictional truth. In The John Wood Case...
...fact is that that best of fathers and husbands, John Wood, has been stealing the firm's money to speculate on the Chicago stock exchange. What interests Author Suckow is how the old Iowans she knew so well square the dreadful event with conscience, with character based on Biblical supports, with the responses of common humanity. Some, including old friends, are uncompromisingly unforgiving. Others, knowing that John Wood broke the code in the hope of easing life for his sick wife, want to be charitable. But for young Philip, life seems smashed, and his agony is the greater because...
...Author Suckow, now 66, lives in California, but not even painful arthritis can stop her pen. She has several books going, and there is nothing in this new one to suggest that Iowa will ever leave her blood. Wooden in plot and undistinguished in writing, The John Wood Case finds its strength in an evocation of the kind of life that the nation may never know again, a society in which the Bible was a fact of life, in which an austere Sunday dinner was eaten in the presence of a blackboard which bore "discussion themes" for the children...
Spare the Rod. Over the years, the female teacher, as reported by U.S. authors, never seemed to improve. There were a few "sweet young things" in popular novels (e.g., Rose Kramer in Ruth Suckow's Kramer Girls'), but they invariably escaped their fate by marrying or becoming secretaries before it was too late. The rest were like Thomas Wolfe's teacher in Look Homeward, Angel ("a gaunt red-faced spinster, with fierce glaring eyes"), or like Sherwood Anderson's frustrated Kate Swift, "silent, cold, and stern...