RECENT fiction reflects unmistakably a changed American attitude towards the newest Americans. We native-born citizens find it less easy to dispose of our foreign-born fellow-citizens as frogs, or wops, or even sheenies. It is dawning on us that America is not so much a melting-pot as a mixing-bowl; that these strange peoples do not come here merely to be melted down and cast in a mold; but are new ingredients, or, at least, fresh flavors for the national porridge. If the Yankee type still serves as chief basis or "stock" in the culinary sense, the less said about it the better. Nobody loves the Puritan any more.... Certainly our midland novels of the past few years (which is to say our best novels of the period) have dealt more and more explicitly with emergent America, with the spectacle of alien types modifying the native type in the very process of "assimilation." Willa Cather's "My Antonia" is a high instance. And what she has done for the Bohemian character and color others have done for the Scandinavian, the Slav, and the Jew; as the author of "Stash of the Marsh Country" did it for the Pole. "Erik Dorn" may very well be a book of mockery and pessimism, but does not deign to protest after the "radical" fashion; it offers no propaganda or theory of living. What's the use? Who cares? Nothing means anything except sex - and that, after all, is only the tawdriest mockery of all. The foreign - named hero of the story is presented as the natural dweller in the great American city, a natural editor of an American newspaper, and a person without real allegiance to any land, faith, or race. These pages are full of brilliant and savage satire upon the American scene and upon human nature in general. It refrains from the fatal errors of belief, and love, and imagination. It is the voice of the sublimated sophomore who leads one wing of current letters in every age just as H. L. Mencken hearkened to it with enthusiasm.