TILL I COME BACK TO YOU

The author of All Brides Are Beautiful (1936) with another very quiet, very real, and alternately caustic and moving novel limited to a day in Brooklyn and the Bridges' family. Plain people, the Bridges, Adele, Nick and their doted-on baby: Hannah and Dave, who couldn't have one; Florrie, nearing 30, and her perennial, uncommitted Edward, a draft-dodger and small time Fascist. All the ""limitless mediocrity.....infinitude of the second-rate"" of Brooklyn, and people like them, carping, nagging, bickering, indifferent to the war, only out for themselves, self satisfied and dissatisfied. And in contrast are Miley (a friend of the Bridges by chance rather than by sympathy) and Sally, with whom he'd broken, and their one day together before he leaves for the Army, having enlisted, and his liberal decency and clear recognition of his job to be done before he and Sally can have a life together. Their love story is very human, very poignant, and a nice balance for the equally real, edged portraiture of the Bridges. Good for discriminating sales and rentals.