$10,000

I AM THE FOX--Winifred Van Etten-- Little, Brown ($2.50).

Touchy, redheaded Selma Temple was walking with her lover, Gardner Heath, when a fox hunt interrupted their peaceful afternoon. The fox passed near them and the girl "saw him trembling with exhaustion, his belly dragging close to earth his brush bemired. His strong claws pulled him up that slope, but the lithe body, weightless two hours ago, was now too heavy. . . . Now not even death could drive his weary body faster up that hill." As the dogs killed him the lovers began to quarrel, Selma protesting against the cruelty of hunters, Gardner impatient at her squeamishness. With this symbolic incident as a beginning, I Am the Fox carefully retraces the steps in Selma s career that gave her a feeling of identification with the hunted, of hatred and fear of the pursuers. A matter-of-fact, occasionally amusing novel, I Am the Fox is the Atlantic Monthly's $10,000 prize novel the work of a 34-year-old Iowa teacher, her first full-length book. Between chapters devoted to Selma's early years her observations on the small-town marriages around her, her first experiences with men, Author Van Etten flashes back to pictures of Selma and Gardner going on with their quarrel about the fox, their deeper argument about getting married.

Since the entire book thus revolves around Selma, it is primarily of interest as a character study of a girl who hovers at the edge of a neurotic revulsion against the role of her sex. Raised in a commonplace, puritanical Iowa town, Selma thought one of her schoolmates was going to have a baby because a boy kissed her. In college she fell in love with an evangelist, became deeply religious, watched the unfolding of an ugly campus "romance" when an effeminate music teacher married to stop the gossip that was threatening his job. At home she saw a still more sordid end to romance when Kirby Townsend married, communicated a venereal disease to his wife, was finally crippled in an accident while driving with a village bad woman. As a schoolteacher Selma was fond of a boy named Dwight Fleming, until Dwight spotted a famed bandit, won a reward of $725.00 for giving information that resulted in the bandit's death. Then Selma learned a little more about marriage when a tormented, ill-favored husband fell in love with her. She was appalled when his wife appeared, begged her to take the husband off her hands. Selma went to New York, but found that she had no taste for Bohemian high jinks in Greenwich Village. With her brother, she went on a tour through Iowa at the depth of hard times, learned more of the depths of small-town hypocrisy from his candid stories of what was going on.

Moody disconsolate, unnerved at Gardner's courtship, Selma thought of marriage as a trap set particularly for her, was sometimes swept off her feet by Gardner s ardor and exasperated by his arrogance At last he told her: "You mistake a morbid imagination ... for intellect. . . .

as she was, Selma recognized the truth of his words, married him to bring the story to a happy conclusion.

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