Frou-Frou

FRIENDS AND ROMANS--Virginia Faulkner--Simon & Schuster ($2). If the recent heat wave had done nothing more than bring this ephemeral bloom to flower, it was worth it. Seldom has a first novel been written with higher good humor or a more disarming wit than Virginia Faulkner's Friends and Romans.* A "comico-romantic novel," it breaks nobody's bones or butterflies, lets no threatening skeletons loose on a frightened world, hurls no manifesto, literary or political. Pertinacious sniffers might accuse Author Faulkner of abetting James Joyce in attempting to restore the pun as an honest figure of speech; but most readers will take these and similar skylarkings with a hop, skip and a jump. As lively and tuneful as a good musicomedy, Friends and Romans is no more profound, but it is cheaper and better entertainment.

Marie Manfred, famed pianist and even more famed inamorata, goes to Italy for a holiday, almost immediately becomes involved with pianos and men, both of which she has sworn not to touch for some time. She has a violent affair with a sombrely pompous Fascist, whose physical charm temporarily overcomes her common sense. When he refuses to marry her, on the ground that the scandal of being her husband would make him ridiculous, she finds herself able to laugh as his enemies force him to drink their health in castor oil. Relieved of her hero, she takes on an earlier flame, whose sense of humor more nearly flatters hers.

Some of Author Faulkner's puns are better than others. Random sample: a horse which its owner could no longer afford to keep in the stall to which it was accustomed. In the wise-crackling dialog which makes up 90% of the book, even the heavy hero is allowed to say. when his mistress asks him if theirs was a case of love at first sight: "No, I had to look twice to believe my eyes."

*No kin to nightmare-ridden WilIiam Faulkner.

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