several months. To say that this is an unusual triangle is understatement, indeed. But it is to the credit of Francoise Mallet that this difficult situation never becomes unbelievable. And therein lies the importance of a novelist knowing how to write. For Claire Morgan, in The Price of Salt, takes a much more commonplace situation, in which two girls, one disillusioned with marriage and the other with courtship, find each other and go off together. But after going through a couple of hundred pages of stilted conversation and hysterics, the reader no longer believes what he found so very convincing at the beginning of the girls' journey.

Men and women who have been following the literature on homosexuality have protested quite frequently, and not without good reason, at the contrived unhappy endings in these books. If the homosexual does not commit suicide, he either murders or gets murdered, or at least lives unhappily ever after. Some of the better novels (as Finistere, The Invisible Glass, and Special Friendships) have followed this pattern. However, the tragic demise is not quite as universal as readers have been led to believe; one might cite, for example, Gale Wilhelm's Torchlight to Valhalla as a novel in which the lovers remained together and happy after they had found each other. It is to the credit of Claire Morgan in The Price of Salt-and perhaps it is one of the few assets to be found in a pedestrian work-that love conquers all in the end.

Before leaving Francoise Mallet and her young and lovely illusionist, a word about the bar scene is in order. Although the entire episode in the women's bar is somewhat out of character with the tenor and tone of this work, the author handles the situation with skill, charm, and maturity that are very gratifying. Here we find violence and jealousy as the night creeps into the morning and as girls become intoxicated with liquor and with each other. I can pay the scene no greater compliment than to say that it reminded me of Momma's Neapolitan bar in John Horne Burns's The Gallery. But the greater sociological value of Miss Mallet's work lies in the treatment of the characters and situations as individuals in an amorous triangle. Their particular dilemma happened to be one involving people of the same sex, but this was only incidental to and not basic to the triangular struggle for affection and loyalty.

The Wayward Ones is the best example of the propaganda novel at its worst. The author is a sociologist who has written a story of girls in a reform school. She has struggled hard with the problems of a young girl resisting the erotic attention of the "pops" but the psychological aspects of such a situation were beyond her grasp. This is particularly evident in the scene following the marriage of the protagonist-heroine to one of the more masculine girls. Miss Harris graduated from New York University with a minor in journalism. We suggest that before writing another novel, she take a few more credits.

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