The first chapter of this book, which is just four pages long, seems to me as consummate a piece of art as the first chapter of "Pride and Prejudice," which also occupies four pages; and the rest of the book is keyed up to that pitch. I am not comparing Sherwood Anderson's narrative soliloquy with Jane Austen's dramatic method. I am comparing merely and exclusively the skill with which two fine craftsmen handle their tools, the ravishing economy of their means, the intensity and poignant reality of their effect. But when I have said a good word for fine workmanship, and have invited curious and shocked readers to take down their "Pride and Prejudice" and compare its first chapter with the first chapter of "Dark Laughter," what else shall I say to commend the suspicious material and theme of the Midwesterner's tale to the favorable attention of correspondents who are sick of "literary rot from the corn and hog belt"?
Shall I fall back upon the earlier novels? The first, "Windy McPherson's Son," 1916, is another tale of a runaway. Nothing enchants Mr. Anderson like a runaway. Windy McPherson is a self-made Midwestern business man whose successful career breaks down in the middle; he decamps and goes vagabonding and carousing through various sordid adventures in search of a meaning for a life that rang hollow, seemed empty. He finds his meaning in some adopted children.
In "Marching Men," 1917, Beaut McGregor runs away from his success in law to find a life-purpose in drilling men to march; he knows not why they should march or whither, but in the form and order and
