THE STARS INCLINE

I still look back on the sense of discovery in reading Davis' first book, The Anointed, and the feeling of real promise implicit in that book. So there is a distinct feeling of shock to find that The Stars Incline is his ninth book -- and once again, as in some of the others, it seems in the main autobiographical. Just another novel about another newspaperman. This one put down his early roots in Denver -- there he met the girl he later married, and the girl who really loved him for himself. There he won his chance to go on to bigger and better (?) things. New York City -- lost opportunities in Washington, passed over to give his wife a chance at her own career -- an eventual break as he goes to Spain, then to North Africa and Italy. Divorce -- invalided home -- and the party at which he meets his ex-wife and her new husband and tells his insistent friends that he knows enough now to know he can't write a book about it. The story ends with his calling Joan in Denver. But the story is actually a turning back the pages of the past. The book has a ring of authenticity, it reflects many of the attitudes and moods of the years between the wars, the awakening of youth, fettered by the isolation of the mid-west (Nebraska) finding out what makes the world tick. Long, slowing-up passages dealing in stream of consciousness manner with his thought processes, slow up the pace of the story, but give the book its basic soundness. It has that -- and a certain vitality, if little originality in either matter or manner.