Now We Are Sex

CHLOE MARR (314 pp.)--A. A. Milne --Duffon ($2.75).

Readers who know A. A. Milne as the creator of whimsical juveniles and endearing animals (The House at Pooh Corner; Now We Are Six) are likely to be rocked back on their heels when they open Chloe Marr, Author Milne's first novel for adults in 13 years.

Heroine Chloe ("The One Woman, with all London at her feet") is as far removed from Winnie-the-Pooh as Amber is from Little Eva. Her beauty, writes Milne, who is now a frosty and vigorous 64, "was beauty triumphant; alive, challenging, insistent; a brilliant attack on the sex of every man." From the instant of her awakening (around noon) to the moment when her gorgeous form slides between the sheets once more (6 a.m., usually), Chloe's boudoir rings with the anguished moans of a slew of infatuated males, ranging from struggling artists to doddering peers, and mostly with names like Claude, Everard, Cecil and Barnaby. Declares Author Milne positively, "There isn't a duke or a millionaire, a genius or a Cabinet Minister, who wouldn't marry her tomorrow."

But Chloe's devoted suitors are rewarded only with such snacks as "the incomparable Chloe Cocktail" ("She sipped it, leaving a kiss within the cup, and bestowed it on Claude as it were a decoration") and "that lovely, quick, tender smile which she had given, he knew, to a hundred men, but which remained always a private benediction."

Author Milne hints darkly that something odd must have happened to Chloe in her earlier days to make her treat men so naughtily. But even after she has been killed off in an airplane disaster, he never tells the reader what that something was. "She was so b-beautiful," sobs her bereaved maidservant, "and now she's all b-broken up. . . !" Pooh is the word for Chloe Marr.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.