Picaresque

JUAN IN AMERICA--Eric Linklater--Cape & Smith ($2.50).*

With an excess of exuberance but never of malice, Eric Linklater describes the rollicking picaresque progress of a young Englishman through the U. S. The satire is incidental, gentle but pervasive; and the modest story of Juan Motley's pilgrimage yields up many an authentic bellylaugh.

As a U. S. Ulysses, Juan was fortunate in having an Anglo-U. S. ancestry which had happily planted family connections at strategic points over the country. His forefathers had founded the middle-western college of Motley. Thither went Juan to add to his education. A personable youth, people liked him, girls were not shy with him. All went well with his college career until the day when he made a horrible mistake in a football game. Then his odyssey began. He earned his bread and beer with bootleggers and racketeers, became the partner of a beautiful but herculean trapeze artiste, in the Carolinas floated down a flooded river on a mule. For a brief idyllic interlude he enjoyed the favors of the lovely Lalage, daughter of Rod Gehenna, Chicago's best bad man, until her parent's sudden and irate arrival. Juan, like all good English visitors, found his way to Hollywood, and there his amorous entanglements almost drove him into respectability and a bank job. His irrepressible optimism saved him just in time.

Eric Linklater knows his America, as all English and many U. S. readers will admit. Some of what he has to say is too true, too well-known to U. S. citizens to be as funny as it may be to Linklater's compatriots; but of his many appeals to an international sense of comedy, many are irresistible. Eric Linklater has spent over two years in the U. S., has also written: Whitemaa's Saga, Poet's Pub.

Published March 23.

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