Day of Wrath and Joy

DAY OF THE CONQUERORS (276 pp.)--Niven Busch--Harper ($2.50).

War Correspondent Mark Gregory did not admit that he suspected his wife, Corinne, of being unfaithful to him while he was away in the Pacific. But when he came back to San Francisco on the morning of V-J day and found that Corinne was not at home, years of suppressed doubt and jealousy burst like a boil. When at last Mark discovered Corinne at a chichi cocktail party, her touchy manner made him furious. "I missed you," she insisted. "You know that. [But] you've got to give me a chance to get used to you."

Mark spent the next hours tormenting himself. Old acquaintances seemed to be looking at him in a strange way--as though they wondered whether he knew what they knew. When Mark found that Corinne, who had always spent his money like water, had paid off all their debts during the war, his suspicions grew darker. He raked up a hundred and one details of Corinne's past which now suddenly seemed sinister--her peculiar childhood memories, the time she had insisted on signing her maiden name to an important bill--and then hysterically refused to admit that she had done it. And what had her psychiatrist meant when he talked, in his mysterious jargon, about Corinne's "association with a type of love which was nonutilitarian, not productive of children"?

Readers--and Mark--discover the awful truth about Corinne in the last few pages of this new novel by Niven Busch (Duel in the Sun; They Dream of Home).* Mark and Corinne have top billing in the book, but Author Busch attempts to show what was happening in the lives of a dozen different people (including an old diplomat, a top sergeant, a fighting liberal) during V-J day's wild rejoicing. Day of the Conquerors is not so deep as a well nor so wide as a psychiatrist's door, but it is fast-paced, triple-gaited, and keyed-up.

*Novelist Busch has also just finished a screenplay (The Pursuit), is organizing a company to produce it, plans to star his actress wife, Teresa Wright.

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