Anemia

THE HOTEL--Elizabeth Bowen--Dial Press ($2.50). The stagnant monotony of English middle class vacation has crept into this reflection on the malign chance of propinquity. A group of English transfer their habits of life to an idle existence on the Italian Riviera, where, unaffected as they are by the land that offers them hospitality, they depend the more upon each other for wherewithal to pass the time away: tennis, botany excursions, picnics, bridge. And every one knows just which the other is doing, and every one knows with whom. There is the agitated little Mr. Lee-Mittison, pathetically chipper when he has organized a picnic, but dashed to nervous gloom when it disintegrates to eggshells and a mackintoshed wife. There is the inevitable pair of spinsters, who paint wretched watercolors, and quarrel over Hedonism. There are plenty of charming young girls, and no eligible young men. Finally there is Sydney Warren, a lovely girl of 22, sophisticated, neurotic, who provides the hotel with faintly perverted gossip because of her infatuation for a charming widow, Mrs. Kerr. Sydney tries to escape the pity of ever-present hotel guests by affiancing herself to a sanguine, vacationing clergyman aged 40, but the clergyman is quickly followed by an anticlimax.

The Book of the Month Club singles out Author Bowen because of her "news of the post-War generation" (it lacks red blood) and because of her exquisite style. The news has been reported before; the style, like the pension-hotel, is afflicted with anemia.