New Novels
Brady, Susan
New Novels by Susan Brady One of the hazards of reviewing books for a monthly magazine is that reviews of the same books appear in newspapers and weekly magazines before you've written your own....
...Marcia Davenport is an old hand at fantasy form...
...Erich Kuby takes us into the subterranean world of human love...
...In Rosemarie the characters destroy themselves or their lives simply by being themselves...
...a tale of occupied Germany...
...Harriet Piers, a rich, beautiful, and spoiled American, is in Milan "recovering" from her broken marriage...
...She has an affair with Carlo Dalverio, a wealthy Milanese industrialist and notorious lady's man...
...Davenport writes about things she knows: good music, good food, fine clothes, and northern Italy where she has lived for the past several years...
...their daughter Millie, ethereal but with a secret strength...
...In Rosemarie (Alfred A. Knopf...
...Not one has missed Kay Boyle's Generation Without Farewell (Alfred A. Knopf...
...The action consists of a number of symbolic episodes, each involving one or more of the main characters, which illuminate the themes: Jaeger's search for identity, the contrast of New World and Old, the fundamental violence and amorality of the military type, and so on...
...Millions of American husbands home after a hard day at the office will suffer for not being Carlo, little knowing that their wives have left the dishes in the sink to be Harriet Piers for a day...
...Though she claims to write slowly and with great effort— and has, in fact, published only six other books in her long career—The Constant Image (Scribner's...
...There is Colonel Roberts, authoritarian to his bristling neck hairs...
...Roberts and the central figure in the narrative...
...Marcia Davenport and Kay Boyle have written about love so glossed over and sentimentalized that it is hard to believe their characters ever have physical needs...
...Mrs...
...3.95...
...But what she knows better than anything else is the hearts of her readers...
...Millie's suitors—the weak and sycophantic Lieutenant Stephany, the cultured civilian Seth Honerkamp, and Chris-toph Horn, a German horse trainer with whom Millie is actually in love...
...Jaeger is also a would-be lover of Mrs...
...Though at least as far from my experience as the complications of a love affair between an American divorcee and a European married man or the machinations of a mad colonel, the greed and stupidity of a whore and the loneliness of powerful men seem more immediate...
...Catherine, the colonel's lady, thoroughly feminine and desirable...
...is as smooth and natural as sweet cream...
...3.75...
...253 pp...
...239 pp...
...and Jaeger, a German who had been a prisoner of war in the American West and who has now returned, a stranger in his own land...
...Kuby reconstructs the story with meticulous attention to detail, ably describing the rise of Rosemarie, from streetwalker to kept woman to poule de luxe, and her inevitable fall...
...3.95...
...His journalistic novel is based on an incident that occurred in Germany several years ago—the unsolved murder of a call-girl whose clients included famous industrialists who had bought both affection and information about their competitors...
...301 pp...
...They fall in love, thus breaking the traditional rules of the game as played in Milan, but part, as they must, he returning to his family and faithful wife Pina and she to her glamorous but meaningless life in New York...
...I read them all carefully in a morbid search for some echo of my own irritation but found none...
...This is the story of a group of people living in a Hessian town in the summer of 1948...
Vol. 24 • March 1960 • No. 3
