A Middle-Age Marriage on the Rocks

By Eleanor R. Mayo

Two People, by Donald Windham (Coward-McCann, $4.95), is perceptive in one facet of its presentation of the temporary disintegration of a middle-aged American in Rome.

Windham has put his finger on one of the major reasons why two presumably intelligent people cannot make a close relationship like marriage work for them; but it is a negative reason and typical of the people in this

novel.

He says: "It would have been a help if a distance had come between them. But without the children and without his work they were too close together, not too far apart... Humor, friendliness, civility vanished."

This flash of hopeful insight comes early in the novel and is not repeated. Forrest's wife leaves him to go back to New York and their children, and he on the loose in a beautiful city, joylessly and with only half his mind at work apparently, picks up an Italian boy on the Spanish Steps.

And here we go again with what is fast becoming the same old story of a male homosexual relationship,

based on nothing and with the participants both aware that there will never be any

thing.

THIS NOVEL does not even leap on the bandwagon. It is so hopelessly flaccid it oozes aboard like a Dali watch. Once there, it has to be pushed steadily and doggedly by the author before it begins to move creakily

toward oblivion.

I don't doubt Windham knows Rome. He makes it seem a desirable place to see and the smattering of information about the way its people live is interesting, too. I wish he could have felt

the same life in his own characters. Forrest's wife, who is the reason for his behavior, it would seem, isn't important enough to be given a name.

As for Forrest himself, he! is like those maddening people who, when asked if they! will do this or that or have this or that, hesitate just a little too long before they say with a weary shrug:

“Oh, I don't mind if I do."

As far as I can see that is what Forrest says to life itself, which leaves the reader thinking the same thing when presented with Forrest. Don't mind if I do; don't mind if I don't.