Word: novels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Cautious Heart is British Novelist Sansom's fifth novel (among the others: The Loving Eye). It is sage, funny, benign and stamped with Sansom's special mastery of situations in which sex, humor and sympathy fight for supremacy in a human battle that never ends...
Marie O'Hara is pretty, and Colin, her escort, is falling-down drunk, so it is only natural for the nightclub pianist who is the nameless narrator-hero of this novel to offer help. Even as the trio sways "like a chorus line" through the nighttime streets of North London, the pianist feels drawn to the girl beyond the call of gentlemanly duty. When Marie invites him upstairs for a meal a few days later, his mind fairly boils with mingled hopes and doubts. For though "there was once a time, a golden age, when such an invitation could...
WATER Music, by Bianco VanOrden (254 pp.; Harcourt, Brace; $3.95), is at bottom an old-fashioned novel about the tortuous ways of young love, even if its style flashes like high-IQ gossip and the characters are as plausibly etched as perfect counterfeit money. In 309 East & a Night of Levitation (TIME, Oct. 7, 1957), Author VanOrden showed a nice disinterest in anything ordinary. Now she makes up ordinary faces as if they were being prepared for an Italian fancy-dress ball. Her young Americans are rich, educated and self-consciously tortured by love and the need to prove that...
FLASH AND FILIGREE, by Terry Southern (204 pp.; Coward-McCann; $3.50), recalls the two-reeler comedies of the silent movies, in which scenes would begin prosaically-with a tea party or dinner in a restaurant-and then break into paroxysms of action. This technique underlies this first novel by Texan Terry Southern, 34, who lives and writes in Switzerland. The book opens quietly at a posh Los Angeles clinic where Dr. Frederick Eichner, "world's foremost dermatologist," listens to the symptoms of a new patient, Felix Treevly. Six pages later the calm is shattered by a verbal and physical...
Side by side with Dr. Eichner's misadventures runs the dewy romance of Nurse Babs Mintner and her college-boy lover. This minor theme leads to the funniest scene of an often funny novel: the seduction of featherheaded Babs which takes place one rainy night in a drive-in theater and rages through three continuous showings of Wuthering Heights. There are other comic set pieces, notably a TV quiz called What's My Disease?, where panelists triumphantly identify gruesome samples of elephantiasis, icthyosis and multiple goiter...