Transvestia

of TRUE THE MAN'S MAGAZINE with exerpts from the book in it (May 1966) and was spared the expense of buy- ing a copy of this very shoddy volume. (The savings went for new false eyelashes, a much better invest- ment.) As the New York Times reviewer put it, this belongs "in that warren of bad taste known as the 'humor' shelf.....One admirer of Robert Lipsyte's writing is still looking forward to his first book." As Lipsyte is a sports writer for the New York Times, I sort of get the message in that last sentence.

THE TENANT, by Roland Topor, Doubleday & Co., New York. $3.95 (1966) Also available in paper back at (I think) 60¢.

This book would not be worth reviewing were it not for the cover picture, which shows a man staring into a mirror from which a shadowy lady stares back. While there is some cross-dressing involved, the story is really one of a man's descent into paranoid. madness, in which he comes to believe the other ten- ants in the building are forcing him to assume the identity of the previous occupant of his room - a young woman who had committed suicide out the window. As the story blends gradually from the factual to the hallucinatory, he finds himself waking up cross- dressed. First he destroys the clothes (whose orgin is never explained); then he goes along, buys his own dresses, and goes out the window in one of them. Miraculously unkilled, he struggles up the stairs as the other tenants watch and does it again! Buy if you want, but don't leave it around for your wife to complete her education on TV! It would probably pro- duce the wrong impression.

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SHEILA NILES

INEZSQUIB:

1st TV: "How can I squeeze the last ounce of pleasure

out of each passing moment?"

2nd TV: "Get a tighter girdle."