Promise

TRIO -- Dorothy Baker -- Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

Fitted together with workmanlike precision, this novel runs its 234 pages with far more intelligence and subtlety than the average. It is a story of three people:

> Pauline Maury, a French professor at a Western University, petite, immaculate, poised, a hardheaded, practical woman who lives in a svelte, modern household with abstract paintings on the walls, Filipino servants and her works on French literature.

> Janet Logan, a sad, sensitive young woman who has been intellectually babied until her 23 years have been reduced to adolescence, and who, at the time the story opens, is recovering after a stay in a mental hospital.

> Ray MacKenzie, a matter-of-fact student who enters the household by way of the University Employment Service, washing dishes and cleaning up after one of Professor Maury's teas.

The story is of the battle between Ray MacKenzie and the professor for the girl, complicated because Ray does not know until late in the battle that he is fighting anyone. The theme of Trio, troubling and unpopular, has the narrow importance of illuminating one aspect of the emotional disorder in American moral and educational life. What the simple Ray did not guess at first was that the relationship between the sharp professor and the trembling student had been intimate enough to drive Janet into a mental home. He discovered Pauline to be more than "a sort of good-looking clotheshorse little pipsqueak of a schoolteacher." But, in finally winning Janet away from her, he learned the truth of their relationship and didn't want Janet any more. This triangular deadlock, unsolvable within its own limits, was forced to a happy end for Ray and Janet when Pauline's plagiarized lit erary efforts were exposed and she chose the little pearl pistol as the best way out.

Where Trio fails, and fails badly, is in Author Baker's artificial simplicity. Fear of the frightening depths and complexities of human emotions, fear of her own sentimentality drives her, as it drives Steinbeck and Hemingway, to find safety in a false toughness, to gush, and at the same time to deny the gush by freezing it in the casual chilliness of slang and jargon. Example: "Suddenly look at him out of the bottoms of the green eyes with the fringy lashes, sock her fingers into that wig of hair, twist that lovely perplexed pan. . . ."

Not all of Trio is written so badly. Much of it is clear, direct prose, with emphasis on a photographic clarity of detail. People, the objects in the professor's house and Ray's room, gestures appear with something of the shadowless quality of the paintings of Charles Sheeler. A promising second novel (her first: Young Man with a Horn--TIME, June 6, 1938), it is a good enough discussion of its subject to give readers reason to hope that Author Baker will write better ones.

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