Abstract

Fiction in Review

FOR some years now John P. Marquand has occupied a very special place among our novelists. Practically single-handed he has held the line immediately behind a possible first rank of current fiction. Without himself ever transcending the high-grade-commodity level, he has done a great deal to raise our standards of what a literary commodity can be. Without ever urging us to think that his novels are themselves "important," he has done more than any writer of our time to close the dangerous gap between important fiction and popular fiction. But now, with his new novel, "B. F.'s Daughter" for the first time one has art awareness of Marquand's own sharp sense of the divisions among the social-intellectual classes, arid of himself as a spokesman for the embattled majority.