Word: boyde
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BITTER CREEK-James Boyd-Scribner...
Nearest that James Boyd has come to a modern novel was his Roll River (1935), a story laid in his home town, Harrisburg, from 1880 to 1920. It is his theory (like that of James Branch Cabell) that good novels cannot be written about the present age; a writer needs "the perspective of years to know what most of it amounts to-if anything." Not because his theory is necessarily correct, but because he has written good U. S. historical romances (Drums, Long Hunt, et al.), readers will be glad that Bitter Creek returns to the past...
...main story concerns Ray's life on the range-punching cows with such picturesque partners as Absolute Jones, Greasy Oscar, Springtime, hunting with the Piegan Indians, getting mixed up in an Indian war. It is cowboys-&-Indians romance plus a heroine. But Author Boyd's cowboys, Indians, adventures, "cussing ladies," homesteaders, plains and hills are as real as oldtime calico, make the Wild West almost as gripping for grownups as it once was in the dime novels of one's youth...
Latest such old wife's tale is Madeleine Boyd's novel, Life Makes Advances (Little, Brown, $2.75), by the separated wife (now a Manhattan literary agent) of an elegant Manhattan ex-critic. While husband's and wife's names are fictitious, Author Boyd confesses the characters are real...
Properly, such human documents should be reviewed by a psychiatrist. No one else could satisfy the reader's main curiosity, namely, what motives of exhibitionism, just grievance or resentment against a male-dominated world prompt the writings of such a book. Madeleine Boyd does a thorough job in messing up the portrait of the elegant husband. But she herself does not come through looking as though she were dressed for church...