Babies

A SILVER RATTLE--Sylvia Thompson-- Little, Brown ($2).

It is Sylvia Thompson's ambition (in real life she is Mrs. Theodore Dunham Luling) to have six children, innumerable friends, no ugly furniture. By last week only two of the children had materialized, but her eight novels were a brood of legitimate offspring most mother-authors would be proud of. Her latest, A Silver Rattle, keeps up the high family average. As in Breakfast in Bed, Author Thompson's narrative method is centrifugal: her story is less a novel than a series of related pictures, not always in chronological order. But for modern readers who are not easily flustered by cinema technique, A Silver Rattle will be plain and pleasant sailing.

Says one of her Edwardian cake-eaters, "Every baby ought to have a silver rattle." Not all the children in this story were so lucky. When Francesca married Adrian it was a love-match, and their son Robin was no accident. But Adrian was such a drifter that Francesca finally cut loose from him, tied up to the solider character of Frederick. The child of their marriage was born not only to comfort but security. From the triumphantly peaceful room where Francesca lies with her infant daughter the story reaches out into surrounding space and time: to unhappy Adrian, drifting between casual beds and bars, writing his ex-wife vague British congratulations from a cafe in Venice; to prolific Mrs. Ramage in the maternity ward, more pleased by the tulips from an unknown lady than by the birth of one more little Ramage; to the middle-aged carpenter's wife whose baby, after an agonizing labor, was born dead (it would have had no silver rattle in any case); to rich, ugly Dorothy, whose hen brain mercifully was unable to tell her how miserable she was; to the Junoesque showgirl who had capped her career by marrying a faithful goose and finding him such a swan that she proudly concurred in naming their first-born "Shakespeare"; to aging Aunt Juliette, the Edwardian grande dame, wondering not if flirting had been wrong but if flirting was all; to Nurse Forbes, whose professionally cool head had at last conquered her hot heart; and back to Francesca again, listening for her husband's step on the stairs.

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