Helen MacInnes has published five novels of life abroad. In "Rest and Be Thankful" she not only taps the American scene for the first time but seeks the very essence of it in the cattle lands of Wyoming. To that end she has shaped a story with precision, fine tolerance and manifest skill. If it displays more facility than force, and is sometimes tentative when it should have been trenchant, one must admire her resolution in the choice of theme. This was not a lazy self-assignment.

What the author has undertaken is a sharp, ironic juxtaposition of Eastern culture and Western customs, not only in relation to each other but in contrast with European life. In passages of barbed humor, weathered wranglers and hard-muscled ranch owners take the measure of literary drones and novelists in embryo. Here is a precise differentiation between breeding as applied to manners and...