Intensity in the Alps

1939 (152 pp.)--Kay Boyle--Simon & Schuster ($2.50).

Why is it that Kay Boyle's novels so often disappoint? She has a glittering style that seizes the reader and carries him away at a nervous quickstep. But when the reader drops exhausted at the end, he is apt to feel more cheated than rewarded. Her tense characters are whipped by urgencies too violent for the problems they face; and as people, they don't stand a chance of survival between the same covers with Author Boyle's high-tension, consuming prose.

In a high French Alpine village, Corinne Audal has lived for two years with an expatriate young Austrian ski instructor. Daughter of one French army officer and wife of another, she has given up her family and her marriage and stood up proudly to the criticism and contempt of the conservative villagers, all to win and keep Ferdl Eder's "blond alien flesh." Eder had lost his country when Hitler took Austria. When he wanted to visit his family in Austria, he had to apply for a German passport. To Corinne his act seemed a compromise with Hitlerism and a betrayal of her love. She persuaded him to tear up his passport. Then came the war: France considered him an enemy alien; when he tried to enlist in the French army he was rejected. In the end he marched off to a French concentration camp for aliens, while Corinne settled down to wait.

Author Boyle and her characters wrestle these slender materials with an intensity that would seem supererogatory in Dante or Milton.

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