Is this merely a return to their villages, merely domestic sentimentalism in a lovely guise?  Mr. Dell has gone a little too deep to incur the full suspicion.  He has got very near to the biological foundations of two lives, where, for the moment, he rests his case.  There is more to come, however, in this spiritual history, whether Felix Fay knows it or not.  Let the house be built and the children be born, and Felix and Rose-Ann, though citizens and parents, will still be individuals and will still have to find out whether these complicated threads of loyalty last better than the simple threads which broke.  Felix, in discovering the lure of stability, has not necessarily completed the circle of his life.  Freedom may allure him again.

The Briary-Bush, less varied than Moon-Calf, is decidedly profounder.  It hovers over the dark waters of the unconscious on perhaps the surest wings an American novel has ever used.  Though it has probed difficult natures and knows them thoroughly it does not flaunt its knowledge but brings it in only when it can throw some revealing light upon the outward perplexities of the lovers.  Thus it gives depth and timbre to the story, and yet allows the characters to seem actual persons actually walking the world.  At the same time, Mr. Dell does not possess a too vivid sense of externality.  In both his novels all facts come through the mist of Felix’s habitual confusion, and in that mist they lose dramatic emphasis; muted, they are not able to break up the agreeable monotone in which the narrative is delivered.  But underneath these surfaces, seen so poetically, there is a substantial bulk of human life, immemorial folkways powerfully contending with the new rebellion of reason.

F.  Scott Fitzgerald

Domesday Book, Poor White, The Anthology of Another Town, Main Street, Miss Lulu Bett, The Age of Innocence, The Romantic Woman, and Moon-Calf would make 1920 remarkable even if that year had not brought forth other novels of equal rank; if it had not brought forth James Branch Cabell’s richly symbolical romance Figures of Earth and Upton Sinclair’s bitter indictment 100%.  And though most of these seem somber, there came along with them another novel in which were gaiety and high spirits and the fires of youth.

F. Scott Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise also had broken with the village.  He wrote of his gilded boys and girls as if average decorum existed only to be shocked.  But he made the curious discovery that undergraduates could have brains and still be interesting; that they need not give their lives entirely to games and adolescent politics; that they may have heard of Oscar Wilde as well as of Rudyard Kipling and of Rupert Brooke no less than of Alfred Noyes.  Mr. Fitzgerald had indeed his element of scandal to tantalize the majority, who debated whether or not the rising generation could be as promiscuous in its behavior as he made out.  It is the brains in the book, however, not the scandal, which finally count.  His restless generation sparkles with inquiry and challenge.  When its elders have let the world fall into chaos, why, youth questions, should it trust their counsels any longer?  Mirth and wine and love are more pleasant than that hollow wisdom, and they may be quite as solid.