For the purposes of "The Trojan Brothers," her latest novel, Miss Johnson has given up the wholesale manufacture of character types in favor of a well-constructed plot. The result is the most tightly knit and satisfying narrative she has yet produced.

In a London music hall her English Pagliaccio moves toward tragedy in the hindquarters of a horse….

While doom is still rumbling off stage Miss Johnson gives her own best performance. There are authentic outlines of drab, matter-of-fact lives behind the honky-tonk of the music hall; the miasma of jealousy and intrigue hanging over backstage like a queasy cloud; sounds and smells of plain homes; acrid flavor of small, nagging worries. Paradoxically, so long as she is concerned with life around and about the theatre, the author gives us reality; it is only when she probes into the everyday impulses and motives of her actors that a...