Letty Fox: Her Luck

Rating:
Summary: A master modern storyteller (in search of a good editor...)
Review: Many rate Christina Stead among the finest modern writers of the century, and there's almost no denying her skill with shaping a beautiful sentence. Unfortunately, Stead has trouble sometimes shaping a good novel--she tends to go and on--, and this deficiency is largely at work in what many consider her second-best work (after THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN), LETTY FOX: HER LUCK.

Letty is a young woman in Manhattan living during wartime largely by her wits, and the beginning twenty pages--detailing her move into a new apartment in the Village--is so marvelous that your readerly expectations become raised to a very high degree. Stead dashes them, however, once you move to her life's narrative, which mostly details a series of women in her extended family depending on men for both money and affection, and doing nearly everything they can think of doing to acquire these things. Some of her ideas are brilliant, and the sentences read gorgeously--but you keep wishing for someone to step in and cut all the repetitions. Readers may find their patience tried by the 600-some pages of very little action, and yet Letty herself remains a very memorable achievement, an addition to a gallery of heroines of such questionable scruples as Defoe's Moll Flanders or Cary's Sarah Monday.