Such is the background of Mr. McAlmon’s sketches. “Village” is hardly a novel. It is a collection of vivid impressions serving to complete our knowledge of the tragedies of moral isolation in America. The pictures drawn by the author possess neither Sinclair Lewis’ humor nor Sherwood Anderson’s _chiaro-oscuro_. They are deliberately bare, with a thorough-going objectivity and frankness, reminiscent of a pure, undiluted Maupassant. I shall not tell in detail the plot of “Village.” There is none, to tell the truth. It is merely a series of sketches and youthful confessions. What Robert McAlmon is telling us with his cruel and cold impartiality of his young Americans is very little edifying. Snow storms and rains are not the only weapons Wentworth uses to fight off the drought. Its church spire does not cast its shadow upon saints. The youth of Wentworth literally have the devil in them. McAlmon is less optimistic than Mark Twain. His Tom Sawyers are cynics, with their own good reasons. They are stifled by their surroundings, they are walled up alive. John Campbell, one of the characters of the book, is but a child. He is being bored to death in the village. One day he runs out into the fields, under the pretext of catching rabbits. He is brought home bleeding. We surmise that he has committed suicide to escape paternal corrections and reproof: John Campbell went past cornfields late autumn crisped. Their leaves rasped and shuddered in the wind, and their stalks whined from the frost that kept them brittly chilled. A sear chill was within him too, a hard rebellion at life, rotted only some portion of his heart where the weakness of despair was a warm fluid dampening the hardness of his defiance to helplessness. Alternate waves of rage at, and indifferent understanding of, his father, flowed through him. At moments he felt he could almost sympathize with what life had made the older man. It was this very sympathy that made him feel helpless himself in all of his outlook on existence. At angry moments he could hatingly see his father’s face within his mind, a face with waxen, shiny eyes, insistent with neurotic rage. How dared he, having messed up his own life, as he had, presume to dictate to anybody else what they should or should not do, as though he had discovered a right way, and knew always that what his son was doing was wrong.