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Books

Lady With a Problem

By Alvin Beam, Assistant Book Editor

A Second Hand Life (Macmillan; $5.95), is the story of a woman attracted, excessively, compulsively, dangerous ly, to the male, to physical man-as Don Birnam in Jack son's "The Lost Weekend" was attracted to alcohol. "The Lost Weekend" was published in 1944. In 1946 Jackson offered "The Fall of Valor," its protagonist a man crippled by homosexual tendencies. In 1948 c à me "The Outer Edges," a novel centered on the murder of two young girls by a brutish 17-year-old boy.

JACKSON, THEN, has made a kind of specialty, in his four novels, of abnormal psychology of portraying the outsider, the emotionally off kilter or far off kilter, the strangely possessed.

"The Lost Weekend" was, for the most part, an artistic as well as a clinical success, so to speak, and it was sensational at the box office, both as book and as movie. Its title became part of the American language and

Jackson became an important man.

The second and third books whatever their literary mer-

it, were not box-office wonders. But now, with A Second-Hand Life, the cash regisers are about to make merry again. Macmillan has sold paperback rights to the New American Library for $100,000 and of course there is Hollywood.

THE NOVEL'S achieve ment as a work of art is an other matter.

Winifred Grainger, the leading lady, is a banker's daughter, never without small town in upstate New money and freedom, in a York. Her dedication to sex begins with an experience of it with a grown man at the age of 11, and at 45, as the story closes in a form of soliloquy, she sees no end to

its hold.

There is a late-summer melancholy in her revery as we leave her but no funda-

mental unhappiness. Jackher immense, classless son offers no suggestion that promiscuity stems from any deep sense of inadequacy, as in conventional nymphomania. And there is no suggestion that she was scarred by the experience at 11. She was preternaturally ready. ·

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BUT WINIFRED, if different from the inadequate, seems different too from the merely overwhelmingly robust, though this impression may result, with no intention his abundant use of the on the author's part, from stream of consciousness method. Revery seems the chief of Winifred's joys and the exceptional boldness of the direct narrative action it the book lies not so much in contains as in the icons she sets up in the man worship in her mind.

Charles Jackson

AND THERE is no large reality to the two men of major importance in the book. They are, pretty much, faceless. One is the man she fell in love with and would run off. The other is a lifehave married if he hadn't long friend with the malady that he is almost totally nonsexual, though male enough in ordinary social ways.

He is her foil. But the think it over, seems more progress of it all, when you unlikely than it should, even as the case-history sort of thing.

Jackson almost surely had

Unfortunately, there is a haziness about it all. Miss Grainger is not roundly realan eye on box office as he

ized: Nor is she clinically realized with Jackson's former adeptness at the clinical.

planned this work but he also, it seems, was trying for something more. He hasn't quite made it.