Three Unhappy Men

THAT WINTER (297 pp.)--Merle Miller --Sloane ($3).

The children of World War I's "lost generation," themselves the generation of World War II, may be too harried to be happy. But they like to think of themselves as too unsentimental to get lost. In his second novel, Merle Miller (29) attempts an aftermath-of-war pastiche of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, winds up with an embarrassing imitation of his master's style and a case history of three neurotic young men whose problems would be much the same with or without a war.

Ted, Lew and Peter share an apartment in New York after their discharge from the Army in 1945. They drink too much, stage noisy parties and most of the women they know wear round heels. Only Ted is a combat veteran. Lew, a public relations officer, and Peter, a radio scripter, fought the war with typewriters (Miller was a Yank editor). Ted, an unstable and unhappy rich kid, commits suicide; Lew gets a dose of anti-Semitism from the girl he loves and goes home to California; Peter can get any woman into bed but the one he cares for, hates his job on a newsmagazine (Miller once worked eight weeks for TIME) and chucks New York to go to Mississippi and write a novel.

Most combat veterans will probably find Peter's constant concern with his war-fractured sensitivity--and his glib articulateness about it--only annoying. And all veterans will look in vain for anything like real understanding of their difficulties and disappointments since victory.

Several critics have already compared That Winter to Dos Passos as well as to Hemingway, which is to overlook the fact that, above all else, these authors were originals.

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