own confession. He is also a redheaded smart aleck who enjoys throwing his weight around. You hate him. at once. But slowly, without your knowledge, he is transformed from a swaggering braggart into a good oldfashioned hero. (And God knows there are few enough heroes in our novels these days.)

The story is laid at a Cape Cod summer resort, at which LeBlanche is the head chef. The book is marvelously filled with carefully laid and disastrously executed plans of revenge, people getting into and out of bed with people, and people plotting and being plotted against. The characterization is excellent. Among those present are a dumb, muscular lifeguard ("He handled words like some people handle foreign money."), his dumb, innocent girl friend, and a good natured middle aged woman who shares her bed with LeBlanche, in a nice way-like shaking hands. There is also her dog, Triumph, who is senile and blind, and suffers from gas.

This is an important book for the homophile, because Philip Gear Manchester, who works as a maitre d' at the resort restaurant, is homosexual. He is presented as being nothing more than what he is. In other words, he is described as being homosexual in the same sense that he is blond and thirty years old. Philip is filled with good humor, and sees life as nothing more than a personal challenge to his ability to knock snobs and dullards off their perches. In one scene he and LeBlanche take over a sightseeing bus filled with old maid school teachers and conduct them, in the middle of the night, to a whorehouse, where they leave them standing stupidly in the parlor while the madam screams for the police and the patrons blush uncomfortably, feeling that any minute they're going to be rapped across the knuckles with a ruler.

The book is marvelously funny, as well as curiously sad. Mr. Cuomo interrupts the Cape Cod narrative to interject several flashbacks that are deeply, disturbingly tragic. That he can easily jump from one to the other stands as an eloquent monument to his skill. He says things well. LeBlanche and his sweetheart, in one scene, are talking:

"But why doesn't everybody else feel like us? Why don't we feel like everybody else? Maybe there's something wrong with us."

"Of course there is. There's something wrong with everybody.'

"Normal people don't have anything wrong with them."

"That's what's wrong with them."

If the homophile reader is looking for a book containing a homosexual character who has sex, cuss fights, alcoholic bouts, and attempts at suicide, he will be disappointed in BRIGHT DAY, DARK RUNNER. Philip Manchester is one of the sanest, best-adjusted characters in the book. LeBlanche says: "The fact that Phil was queer didn't bother me, and shouldn't bother you either, or give you foolish notions. In the course of my life I've been friends with all sorts of drifters, knockabouts, shrews, rapists, drug addicts, policemen, politicians, businessmen, even schoolteachers, and no one's ever seemed concerned about my explaining them away."

The author defends Philip only once: "What's wrong with this country isn't Phil Manchester-it's all the bastards who get our attention away from their own sleezy dishonesty by pointing their greasy little self-satisfied fingers at guys like Phil."

In truth, Phil doesn't need to be defended at all-even to heterosexuals. He is a wonderful, charming, funny, completely admirable man. And for that, I cannot thank Mr. Cuomo enough. At the end of the book he doesn't commit suicide. He

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