Marriage a la Mode

TOGETHER AND APART--Margaret Ken-nedy--Random House ($2.50).

Pretty Betsy Canning was a long time finding out that Husband Alec was not the man she, thought she married. For 15 years she had been the wife of an obscure civil servant who seemed as pleased as she was with their three children, a tasteful circle of friends as decently well off as themselves. Suddenly, after Alec's and Johnnie Graham's amateur operetta had made a sensation, she found herself a back number entertaining mobs of Alec's "Yahoo" theatrical acquaintances. He began living in a "genial, gregarious, alcoholic mist" and now declared that their old friends had always bored him.

When Betsy found out about Alec's affair with a stockbroker's blonde wife, she decided on a quick divorce. Easy-going Alec agreed, but hoped to talk her out of it. On their private beach in North Wales one day he thought he had succeeded, made his resolutions to turn over a new page. But by that time his domineering mother had found out about their divorce plans and was already on the scene.

Meddling families and friends soon precipitated a hopeless mess. Alec ran off with the 16-year-old governess, had a child by her, finally married her apathetically after turning down Betsy's offer to come back to him. Betsy married her rich, aged, Socialist cousin Max. The children took sides, floundered precariously trying to adjust themselves to their parents' sorry conjugal relations.

Author Kennedy's most skillfully constructed novel, Together and Apart attempts no diagnostic moralizing, leaves the reader to decide whether the Cannings' divorce scars were tokens of a constitutional middle-class weakness or a virulent old germ to which all flesh is heir.

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