_The Blind Bow Boy_ is the story of a summer opera season in New York, an international alliance in the person of Zimbule O’Grady, and the delightful exploits of the Duke of Middlebottom, who lived by the Julian Calendar and in this case “contrived to evade all unsatisfactory engagements, especially if they were complicated in any way by daylight-saving time, an American refinement of which he was utterly ignorant”. There are also some trivial protagonists who strut through the book in a manner slightly suggestive of exaggerated and overdressed Weiner sausages. The author has an unfortunate habit of becoming enamoured of one character for a chapter or two, and then without warning shifting his affections to another, a failing which gives the reader a somewhat biographically errant point of view. It is also unfortunate that Van Vechten cannot follow a more clearly defined theme, for he has no sense of plot, shading, or climax. His stories are a series of photographically vivid scenes, innocent of all structural liaison, and hanging together only by virtue of the bookbinding which keeps them from fluttering away to the various literary hemispheres. It is, however, very satisfactory reading, for in his multiplex catalogues of names and places the author gives the reader a vivid sense of personal familiarity which is quite flattering. No doubt this effect is obtained by mentioning so many aspects of contemporary civilization that everyone must needs have come in contact with at least some few of them. L. M. B. _A Son at the Front._ By EDITH WHARTON. (Charles Scribner’s Sons.) As the most and vagueness surrounding the late war are slowly cleared away by passing time and subsiding emotions, and the conflict settles into a semblance of perspective, the more recent books that deal with it show an increasing grasp of its essentials, and a higher understanding of its trials and lessons. Where once were only trees, we can see a forest now, whose outlines are becoming more distinct as the shock of the cataclysm becomes a memory. It is past, now, and irrevocable, open to description or interpretation.