clusions in the field be repeated and re-emphasized until the inert masses of society are moved to action even at the expense of boring the well-informed and advanced thinkers with what seem to them clichés and platitudes. (Man and Society has not reached this point as yet.) I think all who are interested in legal reform and rational attitudes in the field of sex and other social topics, should welcome every new contender for constructive action.

Thomas M. Merritt

A NEARNESS OF EVIL by Carley Mills, Coward McCann, New York, 1961, $3.95, 255 pp.

Involved, as it is, with such elemental human passions as love, fear, hate, joy, pride, vanity, plus a deceit that borders on the colossal, and high stakes, and serious risks, the subject of homosexuality is worthy of any great writer. Indeed, so fascinating is the subject that it would seem difficult to make it lifeless. Yet that is exactly what Mr. Mills has managed to do and what most writers of homosexual books manage to do.

All the ingredients in these novels seem to be there, but somehow nothing adds up-nothing happens or seems real. We who live the life know that it is very real and earnest, but we don't see it in the pages of the fiction we read. Too seldom do we get a Compton Mackenzie, a Djuna Barnes, or an Angus Wilson, or, I might add, a Mary Renault who is able to write a simple, honest, straightforward, unexaggerated story about homosexual life.

Mr. Mills has attempted the usual portrait of that particular type of homosexual who nobody really likes but everyone knows because he is rich and spoiled and terribly generous with his hospitality (he cannot bear to be without company) and who is, for this

reason alone, continually surrounded by interesting people.

Bobby Rindshauer grows up in a very correct German-Jewish community in New Jersey at the turn of the century. He is the son of parents who are wealthy but not wholly accepted by the other residents of Long Branch because of Mrs. Rindshauer's background. Shunned by most of the children his own age, Bobby grows up to hate his own people, and after his father's death, changes his name to Randall. His sexual proclivities by this time have long since become well known and of particular concern to his mother.

On the advice of a close friend of his father's, he is persuaded to marry, for the sake of propriety, an attractive young lady who knows the score. They have a daughter. Bobby soon becomes bored with marriage and New York and flees to the Riviera where Diane is raised amidst her father's fantastic excesses and debaucheries. Small wonder then that when they have to return to New York because of the War, Bobby should find that his daughter can compete with him at his own game. A grim struggle and hatred develops between Bobby and Diane over the love of a young, handsome man that Bobby picks up for his own. The triangle becomes unbearable and finally hits the front pages in a sordid and brutal murder. The resulting trial brings the novel to an end and in it is some surprising testimony. All this is seen through the eyes of the Rindshauer family's attorney and advisor who is Bobby's age and his only friend, and, strangely enough, the most unsympathetic character in the book.

Throughout, the author has overindulged himself in distention and exaggeration. For all of the action and excess of living, one still comes away unimpressed and with many doubts about it all.

D. S.