Josephine Herbst’s novel, Nothing is Sacred, which will be issued in September by Coward, McCann, took command of my intelligence with its first sentence when I read it in manuscript and it continued to exercise its singular quality of impressive interest until now it has found its publisher and I have read it right through again in proofs. That is due not to the interest of the subject but to the sheer skill of its narrator. There is no reason – no reason in the world – why I, hardened European as I am – should be interested in and should be kept reading far into the night twice running by the affairs of a quite undistinguished family in a quite indistinguishable American small town – but that is what has happened to me.

You see if a book begins: ‘“Can I talk to you a minute!” said Harry Norland to his mother-in-law. He stood in the kitchen doorway with his hat on’, you are given at once a sense of interest as strong as you receive at the opening of a good detective story and the person who so begins a book will have the sense to carry it on at the same pitch of interest. There is no reason why the story of a small-town family should not be as interesting as any detective-romance – the trouble usually is that the narrators of such tales begin with the thesis that the life described has by them been found uninteresting and that they must therefore make an uninteresting story out of it. But the actual livers of such lives seldom find them uninteresting per se – or it might be truer to say that the dwellers in small towns seldom find small-town life as such other than thrilling with its struggles for precedence, local renown, prosperity and the rest. They may of course have intervals of dullness – but who has not? But the fact that they continue to live in small towns and that small towns continue to exist is the proof that their inhabitants find there an interest in life that is not apparent to the outsider.

That really is the problem that is before the modern novelist. If the novel in the future as in the past can only exist with the unusual, the hero, the type, or the demi-god for its sole pabulum, it must in a more and more standardizing world end by losing all contact with life – and by dying as a form of art. And that is the problem that Mrs Herbst has attacked and triumphantly overthrown. For me at least she has done this, and I do not believe that as reader I differ much from the ordinary reader of light fiction: I mean that when I do surrender to reading a book I surrender just as fully as any child reading Hans Andersen or any commuter reading Sherlock Holmes.

I have been, twice, just as thrilled to know whether Harry Norland made good the club-money that he had embezzled as to know who committed any murder anywhere – just as thrilled, twice, to know, how his mother-in-law was going, once again, to get the resulting mortgage off her house; and I have twice been left speculating as to how Mr Winter, after his wife’s death, liked living by turns with his daughters and their families, and saying to myself: ‘Perhaps he will – because in the end they are very decent, dutiful girls – or perhaps he won’t because he is an old man of strong character and they are all rather nervous people…’ The problems of these quite commonplace people become, in short, one’s own problems during the reading of the book, and one leaves them, with a pang of regret – for the destroyed contents of the ragbags of a lifetime in the attic, and of regret as if one were moving into another town and leaving people whom on the whole one liked and respected. In short this is the sort of novel that I want to see make its mark – for the sake of the art of the novel, which is an art I love. I hope it may faire école, find thousands of readers, and earn for its writer glory enough to make her continue to go on doing this. And I don’t know that, if I wanted to impress a foreign audience with what the native American really is – a normal, honest, wrong-headed, rightly-inspired, undulled – above all undulled! – American that I really like, I don’t know that it isn’t Nothing Is Sacred that I would give to those Dagos. For there stands out in this book a quality of family solidarity, of family dutifulness and above all of family consideration between sensitive individuals such as rarely swims to the surface in the more tumultuously manifest features of life here. I know, I mean, that it exists and is touching and beautiful, but I don’t know where – if it isn’t in Nothing Is Sacred – I should put my finger on the expression of it.