Small Puddle

JEHOVAH BLUES (282 pp.)--Marguerite Steen--Doubleday ($3.50).

In 1941, Novelist Marguerite Steen punched out a 2 1/4-lb., 1,015-page bundle of picaresque entitled The Sun Is My Undoing. It was all about a lusty, highly unprincipled family named Flood, who built up a tidy 18th-century fortune in the slave trade, and it sold more than 600,000 copies in all editions. Three years ago, in Twilight on the Floods, Author Steen brought the family up to the late 19th century, and showed them ebbing into downright respectability. Now, in Jehovah Blues, she puts a short and almost dispirited postscript to the story; the Floods have evaporated to a small perfume-puddle of neurosis named Aldebaran.

Poor Aldebaran Flood. She is beautiful (if one admires a face of "grey bone with a coral gash across it"), and she could paper Piccadilly with the receipts from her bestselling novel, Bells on Her Fingers. But Aldebaran is a child of fate--the "blood guilt" of her ancestors keeps "working itself out," and she "can't help being passionate about anything to do with colored people."

This includes jazz music and, in particular, a jazz musician she once slept with in Paris--one Lee Marion, who wrote a song called Jehovah Blues ("The beat . . . was a slow dripping of blood") and then headed back to the U.S. Aldebaran spends the greater part of the book in pursuit of Musician Marion, who quite evidently does not want her blood guilt dripping on him. Aldebaran realizes this only after she and Author Steen have floundered through the swamplands of the U.S. color question.

Once in the open again, Aldebaran is only too glad to marry the first man who offers her a steamship company as a wedding present. In this case there can be no complaint about the happy ending--it brings the book to a close some 700 pages sooner than its famous picaresque predecessor.

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