25 - The Short Reign of Pippin IV (1957)

Summary

Ben Ray Redman.

“French Romance.“

Saturday Review, 40

(13 April 1957), 14.

Graham Greene makes a practice of distinguishing between his “novels” and his “entertainments.” In a similar way John Steinbeck has set his latest book The Short Reign of Pippin IV apart from the bulk of his fiction by dubbing it “A Fabrication.” He could have just as well, and perhaps more accurately, have called it a humorous fantasy.

The idea from which The Short Reign of Pippin IV springs is one that might have stimulated the playful imagination of Anatole France, one that might have excited Robert Nathan's fancy; and it is tempting to speculate upon what these authors might have done with it. We can be certain, I think, that either of them would have exploited this idea with more inventiveness, and more entertainingly, than has Mr. Steinbeck. He puts very little flesh on the bare bones of his idea; the entertainment that he provides is thin broth indeed; and when we have finished The Short Reign of Pippin IV we are left with the impression that it is the sort of thing that Art Buchwald might have written, had he decided to parlay a newspaper column into a short book.

The brief tale begins in the year 19—, when France, as is not unusual, finds itself without a government, and all efforts to form one seemed doomed to failure. “For three days the struggle raged. The leaders slept on the brocade couches of the Grand Ballroom and subsisted on the bread and cheese and Algerian wine furnished by M. le President. It was a scene of activity and turmoil.”