Girl with Green Ink

CASUALTIES OF PEACE by Edna O'Brien. 175 pages. Simon & Schuster. $4.50.

Books by girls, especially those grown-up girls who get their diary jottings published under the guise of novels, should be read by other girls. The best of them have the quality of gossip--a mixture of fact and fantasy, malice and love, like those little confidences that were once whispered in Victorian dormitories. Edna O'Brien, who wrote The Lonely Girl (which became a smashing film as The Girl with the Green Eyes), does so well in this genre that the male reader feels like an eavesdropper. She seems to burble on in all innocence, but can take the hide off the back of any man's vanity. She writes in ink as green as Irish grass--or vitriol.

Patsy, an Irish maid, and Tom, a Dublin jackeen, work for an arty lady named Willa McCord, who makes stained-glass windows. Both Patsy and Willa have trouble with sexual matters.

Patsy takes off, leaving a farewell note after ten pages of a Molly-Bloom-type soliloquy. Sample unthoughts about her unman: "The noise he made when he swallowed; his smelly feet!" Obviously, such a fellow as Tom deserves to be cuckolded. Patsy's choice is a chap named Ron, and together they "could knock spots off the Kinsey report."

Willa meanwhile has dreams of being murdered, as well she might, but female realism always defeats female fantasy. "Sauce was too rich at dinner" is Patsy's diagnosis. Willa is that most unlikely of women--one who is frightened of men. She almost gets over this block after a weekend with a jaded Jamaican named Auro, who has "the palest Negro skin" she has ever seen. When she arrives back home after dark, the poor dopey male, Tom, is waiting at the gate to punish his faithless Patsy. "He rose as she went through the gate and acted so deftly that the scream she let out got lost in her throat as a wail. She died with her back to him and as she fell, he helped her down." Then he saw that it was poor Willa.

With this mistaken-identity murder, the novel ceases to be girl talk, and it is over before anyone really notices it. If there is a moral in this, and there probably is not, it is that old aphorism to the effect that women may be pretty choosy about whom they sleep with but will marry practically anyone.

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