White Harlem

BAD GIRL--Vina Delmar--Harcourt Brace ($2). On a Hudson River Sunday excursion boat--jazz under bright lights, petting in the shadows--Dot of the Bronx picks up Harlem Eddie (not colored), gets goin' with him steady, falls for him (i.e. is seduced) and thus becomes a bad girl. But she marries him next day, and soon enough has a child. Simply this and nothing more--but what more is there?

Eddie Collins hides a heart of gold under a curt manner. He won't allow his young wife to continue as typist, because silently he remembers his work-ridden mother. Bored, Dot window-shops on Eddie's forty-a-week, but Eddie refuses to buy furniture "on time." Finally they find a drab little apartment where Dot busies herself with pink ruffled curtains, neat drawers of kitchen utensils, and (rather than an abortion) "keeping her baby," to the raucous tune of "something good on the radio"--the delirious Democratic Convention of 1924. Follow the usual pangs and pains of childbirth, told with unusual explicitness. The usual nine months occupy 125 pages.

Author Delmar, 23, Bronx-bred herself, reports with winning sincerity the workaday story of small-town white Harlem. Except for formalistic lapses that smack of the copies and carbon copies of her typist days, Mrs. Delmar sticks to the racy inelegant talk of the Collins's and their friends, and thus brings them into the limelight of current fiction, featured with Harlem blacks, New England neurotics, mid-western realtors, Manhattan flappers, Riviera swells. The Literary Guild has made Bad Girl its April choice, because "around the simple story is woven a background so authentic it has the quality of universality."