BOOKS

Notices and reviews of books, articles, plays and poetry dealing with homosexuality and the sex variant. Readers are invited to send in reviews or printed matter for review.

LATITUDES OF LOVE by Thomas Doremus, C. N. Potter, New York, 1961, 157 pp., $2.95. A novella rather oddly compounded of assorted echoes from Edith Wharton, Michael Arlen and Ronald Firbank, loved well if not entirely wisely, and somehow transposed into the period of New York and of Paris at the opening of World War II-one might be pardoned for finding himself more than a little puzzled at such incongruities.

Yet, as the reader follows the fortunes and follies of swishy little sixteen-year old Hector, his posings and his posturings, his forever enlistments. of laboring-men friends with "closecropped hair" lying sculptured on their heads, they innocently at home in his company and he "hopelessly persuaded by the perfection of their bodies, the mindlessness of their beauty," his utterly unscrupulous gold-digging and his thefts from wealthier friends, we suddenly come to see that Hector is nothing more than the forever kinaidos, of darkened eyelashes and exotic perfumes, one of the girl-boys who flocked to the games at Olympus to cluck delightedly at the naked athletes who today haunt the plushier exhibitions of abstract painting or the more esoterically brutal concerts of musique concréte.

And then, somehow, little Hector finds himself ensnared in love with the fatally ill Bill, forty years his senior

and so unlike him in temperament. Yet, as the steward who was helping put Bill to bed on shipboard after one of the fits of illness, "commiserated, looking down on him in wonder, 'There is so much of him, I suppose he suffers proportionately,' for Bill, the climax of Hector's strong, silent men, in dying, became master of both Hector and himself.

Those who find the book overly mannered, something out of a literary tradition passed into legend even before the days of Dreiser, Cather and Dos Passos' earliest work, will miss the odd charm of this little fable of the love between an older man and an adolescent. Perhaps the author wisely couched his moral in terms such that no one would really believe him. If so, then call it a Gay children's book-for grown-up children who need to believe in worlds that never quite were, or could be.

W. L.

THE BIG LAUGH by John O'Hara, Random House, New York, 1962, 300 pages, $4.95.

There is nothing tedious about this novel. Nor is it hard to read. It breezes past. Unhappily, it is a poor and slovenly book, and thus quite a surprise, coming from a writer of first-rate talent. Briefly, it is the story of the rise to fame as a motion picture star of one Hubert Ward, who we are often told is a heel, a scoundrel, immoral, amoral, and downright wicked. The difficulty is that O'Hara, for the most part, is content to say so, or to have peripheral characters say so, and seldom shows us his hero in the actual act of being a louse. Additionally there are a few decent people in the book. And those who might be thus construed one cannot help feeling the author treats with contempt.

There are two reasons for reviewing this book in ONE. The first is that