Round the Square

THE SQUARE CIRCLE--Denis Mackail-- Houghton Mifflin ($2.50). Charles Dickens would have liked this book. It ought to be good enough for most people. Author Mackail has made himself the chronicler of London's "Tiverton Square" --one of those quiet upper-middle-class residential oases in the roaring metropolitan desert. Like Manhattan's Gramercy Park, the Square has a sacred enclosure to which only residents have a key, and within the pale stands the statue of some respectable and forgotten person. Children play there while their nurses gossip; from most of the Square's houses sober citizens go daily forth to do the work of City or Empire. Chronicler Mackail, more classic than Dickens, never leaving the limits of Tiverton Square, lets you watch its life for just a year. Long before you turn the 48th page you feel on closer terms with the inhabitants than if you had been one of them yourself. Like every such community Tiverton Square has its social boss, Lady Poley; its most prominent citizen, Sir John Melhuish; its professional gossip, Miss Leggatt; its Citizen Fix-It, Colonel Parkin-thorpe; its shady businessman, Sir Herbert Livewright; its lady-with-a-past, Mrs. Gillingham; its rank & file of unremarkable characters who in real life would be of interest only to themselves. It is Author Mackail's especial triumph that he raises their realism to the plane of fiction. This year in Tiverton Square sees its tragedy of first love: in the eyes of the Square a victory of middle-aged common sense over two hopeless young romantics. The Author. Denis George Mackail is only 39 but The Square Circle is his 14th book. Refreshingly respectable, he was educated at St. Paul's and Oxford, is married, has two daughters, lives quietly in London where he is a member of London's quietest, most respectable club, the Athenaeum. Other books: Bill the Bachelor, Greenery Street, The Young Livingstones.

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