Post-War Type

LOVE BY ACCIDENT--Louis Marlow--Doubleday, Doran ($2.50). This book's suggestive jacket (by archly suggestive Peter Arno) and suggestive blurb cover what is superficially a rather naughty farce. It is actually a sermon on post-War youth, morals, manners. Its upshot: that sanity and simplicity are best, wine better than gin, old-fashioned love better than new-fangled neuroses. To Tony Buckram women are attracted as moths to a candle. He himself burns with a cold flame. He likes women and is no pervert, but they seem to him dreadfully rapacious, scarifying. Tony has had a queer, handicapped upbringing, on which Author Marlow raises the curtain little by little as the story goes on. A child when the War began, he was old enough to feel but not understand what it meant when his parson father was ostracized and persecuted because he was against the War, when his soldier brother, not much older than Tony, shot himself in France because he acquired a venereal disease. Tony grew up outwardly normal, attractive, good at games, mildly social; inwardly he was stunted, emotionally infantile. Post-War girls find him tantalizing, do their best to seduce him, succeed only in making him withdraw further into his shell. One day Tony encounters an old-fashioned girl who is contemplating suicide for the old-fashioned reason that she has been jilted. Kindhearted, Tony comforts her, cheers her up, finds her different from all the girls he knows, is fascinated, not scared. All goes well, the babes in the wood run away and get married; Tony's old pursuers send wedding gifts. Author Louis Marlow, young, English, has written two other novels: Mr. Amberthwaite, Two Made Their Bed.

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