LAST year Myron Brinig published "Singermann", acclaimed by the late Arnold Bennett as one of the most important American novels of the year. In "Wide Open Town", Mr. Brinig returns to the same setting: a copper mining camp, sprawled over a hill in western Montana, with a population of fifty thousand people, most of them alien.

"Wide Open Town" is disappointing. It does not nearly approach the gusto and vigor of his former work. Rather, it strikes one as being a carbon copy, slightly blurred at the edges, of "Singermann." The failure this time of the author to portray this particular phase of the American scene is primarily due of the American scene is primarily due to the besetting sin of his reliance on "local color." Mr. Brinig has grown up in the city he pictures, he knows its legends and its individuality at first hand--and he had done nothing more than photograph them. He makes no attempt to interpret the originality of his scene, but is content merely to reproduce. The reproduction, too, suffers from the immense conglomeration of detail and anecdote; in the end there is neither order nor proportion and both author and reader find themselves hopelessly confused. Mr. Brinig, in assuming the cudgel of the "local culturists" has failed exactly wherein they failed a decade ago.

If this were the worst sin of "Wide Open Town" it might have struggled by. After all, the average reader unassimilated to its background will not pause to distinguish between creativeness and photography. But the author has taken a cause, has attempted to find the Universal in a mining town. It may be there, but his efforts to prove "the torrent and ecstasy of life" are hopelessly inadequate. The love of John Donnelly, a raw Irish miner, for Zola, an alluring if somewhat incongruous prostitute, forms what plot and motivation there is. With a painstaking that is almost embarrassing. Mr. Brinig devotes himself to an exhaustive analysis of his characters, and finally they, under this pressure, disappear into a rarified atmosphere, incompatible with the gusto of his background. The hero has been on dowed with a sensitive and poetic nature that it patently ridiculous in view of his mentality.

If the author is imbued with the belief that the future of American letters lies in the characterization of regional life and setting, he has failed miserably in his exposition. It is doubly regrettable when when one considers the undeniable beauty of his writing, the gusto and frankness of it. It is to be hoped that he will bring to his next novel a new setting and the same quality of expression which characterized "Singermann." "Wide Open Town" is a definite retrogression.