SOURCE: "Strong Men Face to Face," in The New York Times Book Review, March 30, 1958, p. 4.

Janeway, whose husband was the noted economist Eliot Janeway, is an American novelist, educator, nonfiction writer, and critic. In the following mixed review of Ice Palace, she applauds the nonfictional, historical aspects of the novel, arguing that the plot is "absent-minded to the point of being ramshackle."

It was a maxim of my father's, quoted from a source I have unhappily forgotten, that the purpose of local color in writing is "to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative" [in a footnote, Janeway adds that the line was "spoken by Pooh Bah in W. S. Gilbert's The Mikado"]. Whether Edna Ferber is familiar with this quotation I don't know, but her new novel, Ice Palace, is one of the most forceful illustrations of its validity that I have ever come...