THE FIGHTING LITTLES

Let's take Mr. Tarkington around and introduce him to quantities of the nice young things growing up today. I happen to like them, and to think they have more good qualities than he recognizes. He knows his own period- I wish he'd stick to it, for his portrayal of adolescents of the 1940's is distinctly second hand. He cannot streamline Seventeen, reverse the roles (making his Billy Baxter a girl just a bit older and Jane a boy, and insufferable), and make it convincing. This is a family story, with certain recognizable situations, in which an irascible father with his late Victorian variations on swearing, seems perpetually at odds either with his pretty daughter, and her line of speed-drunk boy friends, or with his young son, who is alternately a smug little sap or a budding adolescent. Not good company, this.