CANNON HILL

Revolving around a place called Bard City (presumably the mid-west) before and after World War I, this is about a middle-aged tea-sipper named Rhoda Beauchamp, and her rooming house. Robert Brand and his daughter Bronwen come to Bard City and rent one of her rooms- Brand an uneducated coal miner who is determined to become a doctor. The long, hard pull that this involves estranges him from his daughter and Bronwen becomes introspective, independent and removed until she falls in love with and marries the adventure-some wanderer, Lamson, who stops off at Bard City on his way to the wars and is later killed therein. Other angles include Rhoda's relatives and their financial bickerings and Brand's prostitution of the medical profession. Unrelievedly dull and flat, with no sense of vitality, this bears little relationship to her earlier The House of Spring (1947).